Stephen Strasburg is taking a lot of abuse for not starting today’s game due to illness. That’s the reaction from this USA Today article:

He informed the Nationals’ staff that he ran a half-mile Tuesday afternoon, was wheezing during his run and simply isn’t prepared to start Wednesday, even though he’d be on regular rest, according to a person with direct knowledge of the Nationals’ pitching plans.

Of course, if Strasburg took the ball and got bombed, and afterward said, “I was wheezing on Tuesday and didn’t feel, right, but I didn’t want to let my team down,” everyone would say one of:

• He’s making excuses for a bad performance.
• Why didn’t he tell the Nationals he was sick?
• Why would the Nationals let him pitch if he was not 100%.

Who knows, maybe this morning Strasburg wakes up and feels better, and by the time the game starts he’s ready to go. I don’t know why he would ask out of a game unless he was really sick.

Thomas Boswell lays it out:

Strasburg is not the only Nationals player to be sick. But Strasburg was sick enough that he cut short his normal bullpen session Monday after just 20 to 25 pitches. The Nats, knowing that Game 4 might be rained out, asked Strasburg whether he could pitch Wednesday.

“I’ll give you what I’ve got,” Strasburg said, according to General Manager Mike Rizzo, who was in the meeting.

Those are the words you want to hear, in one sense, because it means your $175 million star will suck it up and perform. On the other hand, they’re exactly the words you don’t want to hear because Strasburg has, in recent years, shown such a high tolerance for pain that he has touched [sic] it out until he ended up on the disabled list. So, “I’ll give you what I’ve got” means the guy is sick as a dog.

“We just think it’s smarter to give Stras the extra day to get better and, hopefully, have him at full strength if we get to a Game 5,” Rizzo said.

Strasburg is taking crap because Dusty Baker can’t explain things correctly, getting bullepn days wrong and giving untrue reasons for why Roark was pitching.

What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate. And a failure to hit.

The failure to communicate just makes the Nats look like, once they get out on the big stage, they can’t get their ducks — or pitchers — in a row.

So there are two stories here, the USA Today story that indicates Strasburg asked out of the start, and the Washington Post story that indicates the Nationals didn’t want him pitching sick. Take your pick.