On the subject of Felix Hernandez, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: He is the best pitcher in baseball.

I bring it up now for two reasons: his performance in his last three starts and the Washington Nationals’ mean-well but questionable pampering of Stephen Strasburg.

Pampering pitchers is the prevailing practice today. Don’t let them pitch too many innings, don’t let them throw too many pitches in a game, don’t increase by too many the number of innings they pitch from one season to the next. The pampering, of course, is intended to protect young pitchers’ arms. But if the idea is intended to protect and preserve young pitchers’ arms, why are 20 young pitchers from major league rosters among 30 pitchers recovering from reconstructive elbow surgery (a.k.a. Tommy John surgery) and why are 6 other young pitchers among 9 pitchers recovering from shoulder surgery?

I bring the 26-year-old Hernandez into this discussion because despite all of the games he has started and all of the innings he has pitched – more than 190 for seven successive seasons, more than 200 the last five as soon as he makes his next start – he has been on the disabled list only twice, for four weeks in 2007 with a strained elbow and for 18 days in 2008 with a sprained ankle.

I asked Chuck Armstrong, the Seattle Mariners’ president for 20 years, if the Mariners proceeded carefully with Hernandez in his early major league years.

“Actually, we did in his formative years,” Armstrong said, then cited a rule of thumb some people espouse: “No more innings than 10 times a pitcher’s age.”

Whether or not by design, the Mariners have basically followed that formula with Hernandez, with exceptions in 2009 (8 2/3 innings more than 10 times his age) and 2010 (9 2/3 more). Yet Hernandez has carried a full load. In six full seasons he has started, in order, 31, 30, 31, 34, 34 and 33 games (27 so far this season, with 7 more likely to follow). But he has had no need for elbow or shoulder surgery.

“I do worry about it,” Armstrong said in a telephone interview. “I wonder how many pitches he has in his arm. He’s not a maximum effort guy anymore. If he needs to get up to 95, 96, he can, but he doesn’t have to. Early on he often threw a lot of pitches. Now he tells me ‘I’m going to throw 98 pitches tonight’ and he does it.”

On Aug. 15 Hernandez threw 113 pitches in his perfect game against Tampa Bay. He threw 105 pitches in 7 2/3 innings in winning his next start against Cleveland (“Eric took him out at the right time,” Armstrong said of manager Eric Wedge). Six days later Hernandez needed only 100 pitches to gain his league-leading fifth shutout, a 5-hitter against Minnesota.

I had Hernandez in mind recently when I replied to a reader who disagreed with my view that wins for pitchers remain meaningful despite a contrary belief of advocates of new-age statistics. “How does a starting pitcher have ‘control?’” the reader wrote, referring to relievers’ giving up the starter’s lead.

“By pitching nine innings,” I replied.

Hernandez has pitched 16 complete games in the past three seasons. Strasburg has not pitched a complete game in 43 major league starts, which is probably a good idea considering the Nationals’ stated plan to end Strasburg’s season when he reaches an undetermined number of innings. They did it last year with Jordan Zimmerman, who had elbow reconstruction surgery in August 2009.

Last season the Nationals limited Zimmerman to 26 starts and 161 iinnings, not using him in September. He has the exact same totals this season but will pitch in September.

They are following the same plan this season with Strasburg, who had the elbow operation a year after Zimmerman. As of Tuesday the 24-year-old right-hander had made 26 starts and pitched 150 innings. General manager Mike Rizzo has not said when he will shut down Strasburg, but he has said he will shut him down no matter the consequences.

Should the Nationals, who have led the National League East since May 22, suddenly encounter trouble, Strasburg will not be able to help rescue them. If they are in the playoffs, he will not be part of the team that will try to win the World Series.

This plan has been designed to make sure Strasburg doesn’t pitch too much and reinjure himself. The Nationals, of course, don’t know that Strasburg would reinjure himself. They are being cautious, overly cautious, I believe. Elbows are supposed to be stronger after Tommy John surgery. Using the rule of thumb Armstrong cited, 10 times Strasburg’s age would give him a maximum of 240 innings, well above the number he will have, even accounting for the operation.

John, who had the first elbow reconstruction, returned in 1976 and pitched 207 innings, then pitched more than 200 innings in six of the next seven seasons and kept pitching until he retired in 1989 at the age of 46.

The Nationals’ plight is heightened by their success this season. They suffered no ill effect last season from shutting down Zimmerman in September. The absence of Strasburg this September and October could be fatal. Teams seldom get second chances at the World Series. Baseball people generally advocate taking the shot when you have it.

A column in The New York Times two weeks ago said injury experts “have praised the team” for its stance on Strasburg’s injury, but the writer doesn’t name or quote any of his experts. The writer, David Leonhardt, is the Times’ Washington bureau chief. Geography apparently qualifies him to make other questionable statements.

He suggests that the Nationals could place Strasburg on the disabled list, perhaps for an extended period, and he could miss several starts, preserving his arm for later use. Two things wrong with that.

Major League Baseball forbids the use of the disabled list to keep players inactive. Teams have to show that a player is injured. And if the Nationals wanted to sit Strasburg down for several starts, they could do it in September when rosters expand and the disabled list is not needed to bench a player.

Leonhardt also makes conflicting statements about the Nationals’ status. On one hand, he writes that the Nationals are good enough to have a chance to make the World Series even without Strasburg, which probably isn’t so. On the other hand, he says that even with Strasburg, the Nationals probably wouldn’t make it because Baseball Reference ranks them only as the third best team in baseball, based on various statistics.

Two comments about that observation:

Baseball games are won and lost on the field, not on a sheet of statistics.

If Leonhardt thinks the Nationals’ chances of getting to the World Series are not good, even with Strasburg, because they are ranked third behind the Yankees and the Rangers, is he suggesting that the Yankees and the Rangers would meet in the World Series? That’s not likely to happen because both are American League teams. A team from the National League would be needed, and if the Nationals are the top-ranked N.L. team, maybe they would be the N.L. representative.

Obviously no one, including the Nationals, knows what would happen if Strasburg pitched in September and October. He might get hurt, he might not. If the Nationals had been smarter about this whole thing, they could have skipped one Strasburg start a month for the first five months, and based on his average number of innings per start, 5.77, he would have 121 innings now and not 150.

If Strasburg’s limit is 160 innings, as Zimmerman’s was, or 180, as has also been speculated, Strasburg, based on his average number of innings per start, would have 6 to 10 starts left in his right arm, enough to get him and the Nationals through the World Series. It’s commendable that the Nationals want to protect Strasburg’s future, but even if he were to hurt his arm, he would live to pitch again and he and his grateful teammates might have World Series rings to gaze at as he awaits his next recovery.

On the West Coast, fans in Los Angeles are ecstatic and excited. On the East Coast, fans in Boston are dumbfounded and devastated.

Some Red Sox supporters say the trade of Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford and Josh Beckett to the Dodgers is a smart one because it rids the Red Sox of huge contracts. Let’s be honest and call it what it really is – a salary dump, exactly the same as the Marlins have perfected and what the Pirates and other losing teams have used.

The only difference between this salary dump and those that preceded it is the amount of money being dumped – $275 million. Such records aren’t kept, but it’s safe to say that no team has ever lopped off that much money from its payroll, and in one simple trade yet.

But this is what desperate teams do. Can’t win this year? Get rid of your high-price players and plan for next season.

In the Red Sox circumstances, however, with one exception, the people doing the planning are the same ones who planned for this year’s disastrous team. Theo Epstein, the boy wonder, who was general manager when the Red Sox won two World Series, defected to Chicago and the Cubs after last season but left behind a legacy of the $154 million Gonzalez contract and Crawford’s $142 million deal. Epstein also signed Beckett to a $68 million contract and gave John Lackey an $82.5 million deal.

No wonder the Red Sox let him leave with one year left on his contract.

Epstein, though, wasn’t alone in that decision-making progress. He had an assistant, Ben Cherington, who became his successor, but more important, he had an overseer, Larry Lucchino, the team’s president and chief executive officer, who fancies himself a knowledgeable baseball executive. None of those contracts was signed without Lucchino’s ok, and Cherington has made no deals without his assent.

It was Lucchino who overruled Cherington’s choice of Dale Sveum to be Terry Francona’s successor as manager and to hire Bobby Valentine for the job despite warnings to the contrary.

Last week’s trade was so stunning that Valentine’s name never surfaced. But what the Red Sox did was go against the book. The book says a team can’t fire the players so it fires the manager instead. Here the Red Sox fired the players.

If the Red Sox had a bunch of recalcitrant players, it was the failure of the manager and the general manager to straighten them out before the season spiraled out of control.

“I think we recognize that we are not who we want to be right now,” Cherington said at a news conference Saturday “And it’s been a large enough sample of performance going back to last year that we felt like in order to be the team that we want to be on the field, we needed to make more than cosmetic changes. So as we look forward to this off-season, we felt like the opportunity to build that we need, that the fans deserve, that we want, required more of a bold move to give us an opportunity to really reshape the roster.”

Cherington also emphasized a need for greater discipline. Again he didn’t mention Valentine, but the manager needs as much discipline as any of the players. His comments to and about players (Kevin Youkilis and Will Middlebrooks, for example), publicly and in the clubhouse, need to be deleted from the manager’s mind and mouth. Valentine’s acerbic humor can be as destructive as fried chicken and beer in the clubhouse.

Beckett, of course, paid the price for eating fried chicken and drinking beer during games last season. Those in-game refreshments, shared by several players, presumably contributed to the Red Sox’s great September collapse. Besides getting rid of a bad clubhouse influence and a pitcher who has underperformed this season, the Red Sox are saving several thousand dollars shy of $35 million Beckett is owned for the rest of this season and the next two years.

Gonzalez is owed $131.6 million and Crawford $106.7 million. Utility infielder Nick Punto, the fourth player going to the Dodgers, has $1.8 million left in his contract. The total of $275 million is offset by about $11 million the Red Sox will send to the Dodgers. It was not immediately clear why that amount is involved. The Dodgers might have been expected to ask for more money, but they were so eager to make the trade for first baseman James Loney and four prospects that money was said not to have been a stumbling block.

“We’re comfortable with what we had to spend to get them,” Stan Kasten, the Dodgers’ president and c.e.o., said in a telephone interview Saturday night. “Ownership was involved all along. I kept them in the loop. Once we got what we were asking we felt comfortable with it and we did it.”

Kasten said the teams tried to get a deal done before the July 31 nonwaiver trading deadline but couldn’t do it.

“We went through a bunch of ups and downs,” he said.

Asked if the Red Sox seemed desperate to make the trade, Kasten said, “I didn’t sense desperation on either side. It was never a factor at any time.”

As for the large financial commitment, Kasten said, “We’re trying to build a team that fits in the market.”

Under the new ownership group, which purchased the team for $2 billion last May, the Dodgers have been rescued from the bankrupt operation of the previous owner, Frank McCourt. This deal delights the fans and the players, who see it as a commitment to winning.

The Red Sox are committed to winning as well, but they have lost their way and have now guaranteed a post-season without them for a third straight year.

A SCOUT DOING HIS JOB

In this age of statistical analysis, where scouts are downgraded, a sheet of computer paper filled with a pitcher’s statistics would be hard pressed to feel any emotion or stand up and cheer for the pitcher. , however, can still have those feelings and has had chunks of them in recent weeks.

McPhail is an area scouting supervisor for the New York Mets and has had two pitchers he signed make sparkling major league debuts four weeks apart. On July 26 Matt Harvey pitched 5 1/3 shutout innings against Arizona, allowing 3 hits and striking out 11 batters. On Aug. 23 Collin McHugh pitched 7 shutout innings against Colorado, allowing 2 hits and striking out 9. Harvey has started 5 more games since his debut and has a 2-3 record but a 2.75 earned run average. In his last 3 starts he has a 1.83 e.r.a.

Harvey is a 23-year-old right-hander whom the Mets made the seventh player selected in the 2010 draft out of the University of North Carolina.

“Harvey basically came to North Carolina with a reputation built up from his high school days,” McPhail said in a telephone interview. “These kids are on our radar from the get-go. But it was the beginning of Matt’s junior year when everything seemed to change. His command was better, his delivery was more refined. He was a pitcher and not a thrower. The transformation was the biggest thing. He also went from a teammate to a leader. That was big for me. He always had the power arm; he just didn’t throw it for strikes.”

McPhail used a different method to find McHugh, also right-handed and now 25. He found him at Berry College in Georgia.

“I have an affinity for looking at small schools,” he said. “The coach at Berry is a friend of mine. Any good kid the coach puts him on my radar. He showed slow and steady improvement. He was always a pitcher. He wasn’t about throwing to the radar gun. He threw hard but he was cerebral enough to know it was about getting kids out. Others knew about him. I was fortunate enough to get him.”

The Mets picked McHugh in the 18^th round of the 2008 draft.

McPhail has been scouting for 18 years, all with the Mets, beginning his career after 10 year as a minor league player and three years as a minor league coach. He did an especially productive job during Omar Minaya’s tenure as general manager, signing Mets’ reliever Bobby Parnell as well as Harvey and McHugh.

RESULTS SHOW MLB RATES DRUG CREDIT

Critics of Major League Baseball’s testing program for performance-enhancing drugs say recent positive tests of Melky Cabrera and Bartolo Colon show that baseball needs a stronger program. I say the positive tests show that baseball needs smarter players.

I am not suggesting that the players need to be smarter so that they can figure out how to beat the tests if they have used steroids or testosterone. I am saying that players have to stop being dumb enough to use banned substances and think they can get away with it. Maybe some players have used stuff and avoided detection, but it’s not very likely. Although I’m not an expert on the subject, if the testing program is good enough to catch Cabrera and Colon, it is good enough to catch anyone.

It’s the players who have to come to their senses. Don’t cheat, and you won’t get caught. It’s that simple. If a player has a legitimate need for testosterone – and there can be a legitimate health need – apply for a Therapeutic Use Exception, and it will almost certainly be granted. Cabrera and Colon, however, did not apply for or have a TUE and foolishly thought they could beat the system.

Neither player has said why he wanted to load his body with extra testosterone, but we can guess the reason. Cabrera and Colon can be free agents after the season and wanted to enhance their chances of securing lucrative contracts. Now prospective bidders will have to decide how legitimate their 2012 performances were.

Cabrera, 28 years old, was leading the majors with 159 hits and was hitting a career-high .346, second in the National League, when he was suspended Aug. 15. He was one plate appearance short of the 502 plate appearances needed to qualify for the batting title but could still win it if the addition of one hitless at-bat left him with the highest average. Cabrera was named the most valuable player in this year’s All-Star game and figured to be a highly regarded candidate for the league m.v.p. award.

“Ultimately it was just a bad decision,” his teammate, catcher Buster Posey, said.”

Colon, 39, had a 10-9 record with a .3.43 earned run average for Oakland when his season ended a week later. His incomplete record gave him his most wins since 2005 and his lowest e.r.a. since 2002.

Cabrera and Colon, both from the Dominican Republic, were the fourth and fifth major leaguers who tested positive this year out of thousands of players who have been tested. Two of the other three players, Guillermo Mota and Freddy Galvis, are also Latino, following the pattern of positive drug tests in both the majors and the minors.

Of the 87 major and minor league players who have tested positive this year, according to figures from the commissioner’s office, 48 percent were Latin and 49 percent American.

The breakdown of the number of those players who were on 40-man major league rosters will not be available until the independent program administrator, Dr. Bryan Smith, submits his annual report after the season. Last year players on 40-man rosters had 3,868 tests, of which 13 were positive. Those figures compute to three-tenths of one percent of positive tests.

Those results hardly justify cries that the sky is falling, Chicken Little, as sounded by The New York Times last week in an article about the positive tests of Cabrera and Colon.

“To Baseball’s Chagrin, Steroid Era Goes On,” the headline read. The article ridiculed Commissioner Bud Selig for declaring in 2010 that the steroid era “is clearly a thing of the past,” pointing to positive tests this year. The article also quoted the usual steroids zealots the Times runs to for comment every time it writes a steroids story.

I’d have to say that three-tenths of one percent gives Selig a good reason to declare the steroids era over. By comparison, I would guess that if all employees of The New York Times were tested, they could very likely find at least three-tenths of one percent positives.

How bad have the Red Sox been this season? One night provides the stunning answer. On Tuesday night, the Seattle Mariners passed the Red Sox in the American League wild-card standings.

This would be funny if it weren’t so sad for a team that could afford to fire a manager who led them to two World Series championships and replace him with one of the all-time greats – great frauds, that is – and a team that will miss the playoffs for the third successive season – its most extended post-season drought in 10 years – and a team with the third highest payroll in the majors (more than twice the Mariners’ payroll) and that has squandered $518 million in payroll in its three failed seasons.

It’s time for John Henry, the principal owner, to write another e-mail and issue another statement. Acting more and more like a refined George Steinbrenner with each act, Henry sent e-mail statements to Red Sox reporters twice in 10 days in the first half of this month supporting, defending, explaining the Red Sox ills. How does he defend and explain this development?

After games of July 19, the Red Sox were two games from the top of the wild-card standings and one game from the new second wild-card spot. They were tied with Tampa Bay, 8 ½ games ahead of what at the time seemed like the woeful Mariners. Since then, through Tuesday’s games, the Red Sox have had an 11-19 record and the Rays and the Mariners 20-10, best in the league.

Henry can complain all day long about the reaction of the news media to manager Bobby Valentine and the team’s miserable season. However, he has only himself and his top executive, Larry Lucchino, to blame. They made the questionable decision to fire Terry Francona and then the even more questionable decision to replace him with Valentine.

In the Red Sox media guide, Henry’s biography quotes him as saying, “Larry Lucchino is my role model when it comes to baseball executives.” Maybe Henry should choose a different role model. Lucchino hasn’t had too much success the past few years, certainly not this year in overseeing a rookie general manager, Ben Cherington, and overruling him on his choice to replace Francona.

Put aside anyone’s personal view of Valentine (including mine); if you don’t think Valentine is to blame for the Red Sox disastrous season, fine; you are entitled to your opinion. But look at these newspaper and Internet headlines and honestly answer one question: would Francona or anyone else who had been hired to replace him have generated these headlines, all having appeared this month alone? These are only a random sample of the headlines that have appeared in print or on Web sites in the past few weeks:

Players critical of Bobby Valentine

Red Sox players take Valentine gripes to ownership

Red Sox stars blast manager Bobby Valentine in heated July meeting with ownership

Dustin Pedroia denies Bobby V report

Dustin Pedroia on controversy: ‘I don’t think Bobby should be fired’

Henry: Players blamed themselves

Bobby Valentine isn’t the problem, Red Sox players are

In the latest Sox soap opera, blame is widespread

Red Sox are hard to believe

Adrian Gonzalez off the hook as NY Mets’ Kelly Shoppach takes fall for Boston’s text mutiny

Red Sox fire Bob McClure

Communication lacking for Red Sox

Little wonder that the Red Sox are sinking in the standings faster than a block of cement. In a pre-season column a few years ago I cautioned Red Sox fans that with the improvement of the Rays and the strength of the Yankees, their team faced the very real possibility of being shut out of the playoffs. That was when each league had one wild-card spot. Now, for the first time, each league has two wild cards, but still the Red Sox face the almost certain humiliation of not tasting the post-season, not even getting a one-game taste.

Several years ago Lucchino called the Yankees the evil empire after they beat the Red Sox to a free-agent Cuban pitcher, Jose Contreras. Perhaps the Red Sox have usurped the designation, though they don’t seem to be beating anyone to anything, at least nothing positive.

The Red Sox have played poorly for a variety of reasons but largely because of all of the distractions that emerged from the stories that created those headlines. You will find Valentine in the middle of most of those stories, which is only par for Valentine’s course. They are his style, his modus operandi. Lucchino ignored Valentine’s well known history when he hired him, and what the Red Sox have received has been nothing unexpected by those who have followed the history.

Valentine has even followed his history with reporters who cover the team he manages. He initiated his practice way back in Texas, his first managerial stop. Valentine determines which reporters are friendly and which are not, or even neutral. Neutral is not good enough for Valentine. Members of what I call his society of sycophants are favored by leaks from Valentine.

In Boston, the Globe’s Peter Abraham, who covered Valentine in his last year as the New York Mets’ manager in 2002, seems to have assumed command of Valentine’s Society of Sycophants. He has written recent pieces absolving Valentine of all blame for the team’s poor season and placing it elsewhere. Even in his most recent article, which seems to adopt a different view, he manages to find fault with others.

Josh Beckett recently wasn’t ready to pitch, Abraham wrote, “But somehow Valentine did not know, or wasn’t properly informed, about the readiness of one of his most important players.”

That was the fault presumably of Bob McClure, the pitching coach, whom the manager didn’t like – he inherited him – and was fired the other day. I’ve always thought it was the manager’s responsibility to know everything.

Valentine also didn’t like two other coaches who were retained after he was hired.

“Until recent weeks,” Abraham wrote, “after all sides agreed to try harder to make it work, Valentine’s conversations with McClure were dominated by one- or two-word sentences. Bench coach Tim Bogar and bullpen coach Gary Tuck spoke to the manager even less at times.”

So again it was the coaches’ fault.

“The discord filtered into the clubhouse, leaving the players wedged in the middle or forced to take sides,” Abraham wrote, not once mentioning that the manager has a responsibility to make things work.

Red Sox officials, of course, could have made life easier for everyone had they allowed Valentine to have a say in other coaching positions. Like many other clubs, though, the Red Sox wanted to have more control over coaches’ hiring as well as not firing coaches with time and money left on their contracts.

Abraham also wrote, “Players take their concerns directly to general manager Ben Cherington or even owner John Henry, bypassing baseball’s usual chain of command at several levels.”

That might also have been written in Valentine’s defense, but Abraham is right in questioning the practice. It’s a bad one.

In his second e-mail to reporters, sent Aug. 15, Henry wrote, “I understand that when the team isn’t playing up to our standards that issues are going to be sensationalized. But what is important for Red Sox fans to know is that ownership, players and all staff especially Bobby Valentine are determined to turn around what has thus far been an unacceptable, failed season. We are all on the same page in that regard and will not waver.”

Their collective determination hasn’t meant much. The Red Sox went into Wednesday’s game having won two of their six games since Henry’s e-mail.