Many posters have pointed out Strasburg struggled at the very end so he wouldn't have been useful anyways. A few points:
1) Such posts always have the luxury of picking how many games back to look. The most common place to pick is 3 games back, b/c his 4th to last start was 6IP 4H 1R 1BB 10K. Not exactly struggling there.
2) Such posts make the jump from he had a few bad outings to he was wearing down physically. I'm not sure I buy it. For one thing, there was the completely believable narrative that Stras struggled b/c he was getting so upset mentally about the impending shut down. Davey even offered this narrative up as an explanation. If he was truly wearing down physically I just don't think he could put up starts like he did on Aug 21st and Sep 2. His end of season seems much more just normal ups and downs of a pitcher to me.
Four out of his 5 worst starts on xFIP came from 7/20 onwards. Same for SIERA.
If you use K/BB as an indication of command, while his best 3 starts are after 7/20, his next 7 best were before that date, and overall, 14 out his top 18 were before 7/20.
He had one start after 6/20 where his average fastball was over 96 MPH. Before and including that date, he had had 6.
His swinging strike percentage was less than 9% 3 times from 7/20 and prior. After 7/20, it was less than 9% 4 out of his final 9 starts.
His stuff and command sure looks like it deteriorated right around the time it was predicted to happen in his recovery process. It isn't just picking a few starts.
