New York Nine

This has been something that has been stuck in my craw for a few months now and I've grown very weary of what I consider cookie cutter journalism covering the phenom that is Steven Strasburg. He hasnt signed yet and hopefully will but the hype has been unreal in the last few months and for good reason. Unbelivable strikeout numbers like 23 in one game, a minscule ERA and WHIP all seemingly out of nowhere, undrafted out of high school, the hyperboles from scouts everywhere have been abound. Greatest pitching prospect I've ever seen best arm ever and so on and so forth which indeed can be tiring in itself but it is even moreso when coupled with an even more irritating story in my mind, that he's bound to be a bust. Okay maybe most don't say it out loud and put it more elloquently than that, but the jist of it is that he'll never be good, and why? Look to history they say, look at the abundance of busts who were considered the next great thing, guys who seemingly looked unstoppable when they were drafted wilted under the pressure and were garbage, wastes of vast sums of money, the lot of them, but is that entirely fair? Sure there has been a lot of guys who haven't lived up to the contract who haven't been as advertised, but does that necessarily mean that they won't be good? Take Lebron James, no one was more hyped than him, I mean the guy was on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a freaking high school junior, he turned out pretty good didn't he? Who knows, maybe I'm just being kind of crabby and I just read too much sports writing, after all there are only so many angles a writer can take there's only so many things someone can say about a topic, but at least I feel like the overwhelming majority of it seems to have the same overarching message that he's done before he's started and why do that? Sure, a lot of former pitching phenoms that were supposed to be great turned out as being busts, but there are plenty who've been very successful, josh beckett and kevin brown to name a few (i realize they aren't the best examples but very good pitchers) what about them? My point is that all these "busts" are individual cases, guys like Brien Taylor or Todd Van Poppel failed for a bunch of reasons with no real correlation, the only thing tying them together is that they happened to be the bee's kneees of that years draft. I mean shit Brien Taylor broke his hand in a fight and was never the same, what are the odds of that happening? I say let's abstain from judgment until he actually does something, the guys got all the tools to be great for many years, let him and his actions decide whether he's great and not recent history.