Stephen Strasburg is not Mark Prior

Prior illustrates the infamous "Prostrate Sigma" pitching motion.

If you care, you probably already know. The MRI of Stephen Strasburg's divine cannon of retributive wrath arm indicates he will probably need life-threatening career-ending your basic, run-of-the-mill Tommy John surgery, a procedure rendered so simple by modern medicine you can get it done in the food court at Walmart. I can't count the number of times in the last hour I've heard him compared to Mark Prior. Seriously, it would be like keeping up the count of hamburgers McDonald's has served in history. Suffice it to say, the comparison has now been made billions and billions of times.

I even made the comparison. Shame on me. The guys are similar in that they are both stud pitchers who were selected in the first two picks of the draft by teams that really, really, really (x billions and billions) needed them to do well. They both allegedly pitch with the "M" arm motion (aka the inverted W, the prostrate Σ, the sleeping 3, and the drunken zig-zag). They both have struck fear in the hearts of opponents with their dominant pitching and triggered mass bouts of hysteria among their respective fans due to long bouts of not pitching. And both were antagonized by their teams' ex-pitcher color analysts for not being tough enough to pitch through pain.

But the nature of Strasburg's early flirtation with the TJ surgical scalpel is nothing like Mark Prior's early career. Nothing. We have all, it seems, played revisionist historians with Mark Prior's days as a Cub. Please allow me to clear the record and scoff at the myriad fools who claim to have predicted Mark Prior's physical woes.