This is your brain on awesome

Stephen Strasburg made an appearance in Washington D.C. on Tuesday and proceeded to wreak havoc in every awesome way possible. It was more or less expected, but nevertheless the results were a pleasant surprise.

On one single night, Stephen Strasburg was at once a caroling child singing on Christmas Eve, photographic proof of the Loch Ness Monster and a swirling mess of irrepressible (bordering on mythical) athletic glory. On this fine summer night Strasburg was proof that hype – as much as we’ve come to abhor it – is there for a reason.

Without hype there would be no excitement, there would be no reason to enjoy something before we have it in our hands. Where hope can apply to what we wish for ourselves, hype involves something we have no control over. On this night the emotional roller coaster of hype was worth waiting in line.

Now. I’ll begrudgingly relent that ninjas are greater than cowboys, but if pirates are greater than ninjas – with which anyone who values fortitude can agree – and Stephen Strasburg is significantly greater than Pirates, then the logical assumption that follows is that Strasburg is the formidable force of our planet. Or at least he was on this particular night.

In his major league debut, up from Triple-A Syracuse, Strasburg struck out 14 batters in seven innings of winning work. Fourteen! Considering that that’s two-thirds of his age in batters whiffed, the attention is justified. It wasn’t the highest for a rookie debut in Major League history (it was the second), but it was an early return on the emotional investment made by sports romantics who were willing to believe in something before they saw it – and that’s reason to celebrate.

This isn’t a story heralding Strasburg as a certified success (remember when Gordan Giricek dropped 30 points in his NBA debut?), but it isn’t a message of warning either. Nobody knows for sure what will happen over the course of this man’s career (certainly not someone who starts talking about the Loch Ness Monster just three sentences into a story about one of the greatest pitching debuts in recent history), but regardless of what happens, any one of the millions of optimists who invested their passion in Strasburg over the course of these past few months has earned themselves an emotional victory. Go you.

Strasburg will make his second appearance of the season next week against the Cleveland Indians and an inevitably mortal stat line is likely to follow, but let’s not have that tarnish what he accomplished on Tuesday. For pessimists, those 94 pitches, 65 strikes and 14 triumphant Ks are reason to reconsider, but for everybody else it was reason to keep believing, not in Strasburg necessarily, but in the concept of a happy future.

And while managers, executives, purists and critics have hundreds more Strasburg appearances in store over which to argue and discuss, Tuesday night belonged and will always belong to the small part in all of us vulnerable enough to hope for the best and go searching for proof.