Potential Relativity
What can the career of Major League Baseball pitcher Stephen Strasburg tell us about potential, expectations, and performance?
Albert Einstein’s theories of special relativity and general relativity form the backbone for much of modern physics. What is potential relativity? A complete unrelated term I just made up? Yes.
But the basic idea is this: Whatever disciplines you engage in, the notions of “success” and “failure” only become more relative the higher up the ladder you go. The typical framing is, if you are the star of your high school basketball team, you are objectively a pretty good basketball player—but at the same time, you remain overwhelmingly unlikely to be anywhere close to good enough for the NBA. The cliché is true: any NBA player is better at basketball sport than any normal person will ever be at anything. There are only 450 NBA players at any given time, after all, out of a pool of hundreds of millions worldwide.
For a specific example of what I mean, let’s pivot to baseball. Ask five baseball fans if Stephen Strasburg fulfilled his potential, and you might get five answers, ranging from “Yes, he was one of the best pitchers in the league for several years and a World Series MVP!” to “No, he was supposed to be the best pitching prospect in history but was never close to even winning a Cy Young Award, and always injured.”
But what if we start the story earlier?
High School vs. Pros
The MLB draft is unusual compared to the NFL or NBA in that players are not expected to immediately contribute to the main roster, and so there is a much wider mix of players from high school, college, and other amateur leagues who enter the baseball draft.
The reason that certain talented young pitchers aren’t drafted out of high school is because teams know that the guy is committed to going to college before playing professionally. Even then, some of them do get drafted in a late round.
Strasburg wasn’t drafted for the opposite reason. Coming out of high school, he weighed “250 pounds, had never lifted a weight in his life, and after practice every day went to Estrada's Taco Shop… He could throw 90, but he was so out of shape that his knees would occasionally buckle during games.” According to the linked article, basically the only reason he even made it to a college team was because he was tall (6-foot-4) and could throw a ball 90 miles per hour. (Yes, 90.)
In September 2007, less than two years before he was selected #1 overall in the 2009 MLB June Draft, Strasburg was still so out of shape that his strength coach at San Diego State, Dave Ohton, told him to quit baseball. Ohton recalled later to Sports Illustrated: “I didn't even want him around the other players. I had never seen a college athlete who was as far behind as he was. I didn't think it was possible to be that bad.”
And yet, when that article was being published in March 2009, Strasburg was now “the best amateur pitcher in the country and perhaps one of the best ever, with a 102-mph fastball and so much else.”
Highs and Lows
Stephen Strasburg was 21 years old when he made his first Major League start, an electrifying 14-strikeout victory against the Pittsburgh Pirates. The 90 mph fastball from high school now hit 100 mph. More pitchers throw 100 than they used to, but it’s still rare among starters. Back in 2010 it was almost unheard of.
I have the fond memory of watching this live on TV with my dad. We went just as crazy as the crowd did on strikeout #14, Strasburg’s 7th in a row.
Now to quickly summarize the rest of his career:
Strasburg quickly needed elbow surgery. He was then subject to an incredibly controversial decision in 2012, where the Nationals shut him down to protect the elbow despite being in the middle of the best season in team history. In 2014, he tied for the National League lead in strikeouts. In 2016, he made his second of three All-Star Games. In 2017, he almost single-handedly won the Nationals a playoff series after posting a 2.52 ERA during the regular season. In 2019, he led the league in wins and innings, and was then Most Valuable Player of the World Series as the Nationals won their first championship.1 In the 2010s decade, he was tied for the 7th most valuable pitcher in all of baseball.
So, did Stephen Strasburg reach his potential? Compared to the high school version of himself, he might be one of the biggest overachievers in world history.
More Broadly Speaking
Of course, it’s not just in sports where this idea of the relativity of potential is apparent. It applies to almost any skill. Not every musician is going to be Bach or Jimi Hendrix. Not every comedian will be Joan Rivers or Bill Burr. But that doesn’t mean you have to reach the stratosphere of a field to find success in it.
And you can’t really tell ahead of time who will succeed, and what level they will reach. If it was 1830 and you knew of a gangly, axe-wielding guy with a high-pitched voice born in the backwoods of Kentucky, would you expect him to become President of the United States?
But we all have to start somewhere. And in Strasburg’s case it only took two years to go from fat kid to stud pitcher, so you don’t even really know what can happen until you try.
Some Housekeeping
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for his help in this regard! I was glad to be able to make a very minor contribution to his latest post which he graciously included.My other note is, I’ve been publishing on Tuesdays, and I plan to continue that most weeks. However, next week only, I will publishing on Monday (April 8) for reasons thematic to that day’s post. Then it’s back to Tuesdays on April 16—wouldn’t want to keep you from your last-minute taxes on that Monday!
Your Turn
What would your example be of someone, famous or not, who demonstrates that a person’s potential is relative and/or not always obvious?
Unfortunately, that was basically it, as he only threw 31 innings in the rest of his career due to significant nerve damage in his throwing arm. Unfortunately for the Nationals, they paid and owe him a total of $245 million for those 31 innings.
A couple of other examples: Johnny Unitas, Mike Trout (playing up), Ryan Leaf, Heath Shuler (playing way, way, way down). Trivia pros could give a thousand others.
First of all, I had no idea Strasburg was a fat, taco guzzling slob only two years before becoming the most hyped pitching prospect ever. That's a wild turnaround!
Though it's hard to believe in retrospect, the vast majority of extremely successful people came out of nowhere, so to speak. For every son of a billionaire who's destined to a glamorous life from day one, there are dozens (hundreds, thousands?) of people who come from humble beginnings and rocket to the stratosphere on the back of talents nobody knew they had.
I believe that success should be defined by the person achieving it, not by the peanut gallery of onlookers (that doesn't preclude it being fun to speculate on!). A person with a decent job and amazing family might feel overwhelmingly successful, whereas one of the top lawyers in the country might feel like a failure because he isn't *the* best. It really is all relative.
As far as Strasburg goes, it would seem asinine not to consider his career a success. His relative lack of accolades was largely a result of misfortune with his health, unless you want to say that throwing 100+ is a guarantee that one's body will break down prematurely. Nobody should be held to the standard of HOF or bust even if they were among the most touted prospects ever.