During the height of baseball's steroid backlash, fans had enough reasons to focus on Barry Bonds: his arrogant sense of entitlement, his notoriously caustic personality, and his pursuit of baseball's most hallowed record. And while there were other jerks and record-breaking steroid users out there, Bonds's spectacle set him apart. The formerly fleet-footed outfielder, winner of eight Gold Gloves, would hunker over to the plate, lean in with his bulging right arm, and twiddle his comically small bat. Then he'd smack the ball, literally, out of AT&T Park—into the nearby San Francisco Bay. The scene had all the makings of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

The most glaringly ridiculous were Bonds's years from ages 35 to 42, when, in the supposed twilight of his career, he recorded numbers standard deviations away from the upper-limits set by former baseball greats in their primes. If, as Robert S. Wieder said, “Baseball fans are junkies, and their heroin is the statistic,” we were Uma Thurman overdosing on the living room floor, with Bud Selig scurrying in his bathrobe to get the adrenaline needle out the fridge.

Before tearing a ligament in his elbow earlier this season, Washington Nationals rookie Stephen Strasburg was putting up the pitching equivalent of Barry Bonds's video-game numbers. The strikeout is a pitcher's home run—the optimal outcome, individual dominance of the opponent—and Strasburg's rate of 12.18 per nine innings easily edged Brandon Morrow's 10.95 for the league lead. And unlike most other pitchers with rocket arms and high strikeout rates, Strasburg displayed impeccable control—he walked batters at half the rate of Morrow. The only problem is that it didn't last. After 68 innings, Strasburg will need at least a full calendar year to recover from “Tommy John” surgery to repair his torn ligament.

What's notable about Strasburg is how few pitchers have achieved such remarkable—Bondsian—numbers throughout history. The career statistics of the all-time greats—Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson—are but interesting artifacts from a game completely different from modern baseball: their numbers are gaudy, but in a bemusing way, like Ty Cobb's 3,000 singles. Cy Young's 749 complete games will never resonate with a modern fan like Bonds's 73 homers. Modern-era legends like Tom Seaver, Warren Spahn, and Jim Palmer were all examples of compromise, making their marks somewhere in between the old standard of extreme endurance and the new one of extreme power. Even Roger Clemens, the other ignominious face of the PED-era and Bonds's equal in obnoxiousness, was considered great because he remained good—not became the best ever—in his late thirties.

That's not to say that no one's ever tried to have it all. Mark Prior, the most hyped pitching prospect in history before Strasburg, struck out 11.3-per-nine and walked just 38 batters in his rookie year. His second season was equally impressive. But each season after, Prior's performance slipped, and rumors of hidden arm injuries ran rampant. In 2006, he pitched horribly and lasted just 43.2 innings. Prior, despite his best efforts, has never made it back.

And then there's the example of Francisco Liriano, now frequently cited as a best-case scenario for Strasburg. He did the unthinkable, showing up star teammate Johan Santana as a rookie with the 2006 Twins. His season was also cut short for Tommy John surgery. Now, four years later and after a few pedestrian showings, fans discuss Liriano as one of the best in the league. That's the point, though—he's in the discussion, not an emphatic end to it.

Even Pedro Martinez and Nolan Ryan—among the greatest strikeout pitchers of all time—exemplify the modern pitcher's necessary compromise between power, control, and durability. Ryan had the stuff and the endurance, helping him secure the all-time strikeout record, but he lacked the control to be considered among the greats. Martinez had every tool a pitcher could want, but will never notch that mythical 300th win, because he pitched half as many innings as Ryan.

Tim Marchman, a former baseball columnist for the New York Sun, recently posted on his blog the ten highest strikeout rates in history for starting pitchers aged 22 and younger. The names were, in order, Kerry Wood (Mark Prior's similarly doomed teammate), Strasburg, Dwight Gooden, Prior, Oliver Perez, Sam McDowell, Prior again, Scott Kazmir, Perez again, and Rick Ankiel. Of those still active, Perez is the consensus worst pitcher in baseball, Kazmir has a 6.34 ERA, Wood is a decent middle-reliever, and Ankiel is a backup outfielder. Marchman posted the list the day Strasburg's surgery was announced, under the title “Shocked, shocked.”

Stephen Strasburg's injury is a tragedy. Baseball has lost its most exciting player for a year or two, and Strasburg himself is behind the 8-ball on a legitimate chance to chase the all-time greats. And, as Joe Posnanski brilliantly illustrated in a recent Sports Illustrated column, the worst part is how unsurprising another injured young pitcher is: “It’s scary because we’ve seen this before.”

As the parameters of what constitutes a performance-enhancing drug come under increasing debate, Strasburg's injury reminds us of the natural forces still holding baseball in place. In a sport whose fans have so viciously rejected unnatural accomplishment, pitching remains checked by the basic, unchangeable forces of physics. Maybe Stephen Strasburg is nearly perfect, and maybe like most near-perfect things in a human world, we're only meant a fleeting glimpse.