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Strasmageddon is only a week away, so that can mean only one thing: With just seven days remaining until Stephen Strasburg makes his final start of the Nationals’ 2012 season, everyone who hasn’t chimed in yet on the team’s decision to shut the 23-year-old pitcher down is getting in their last licks.

Today’s contestant: Baltimore Orioles legend and unobjectionably beloved baseball icon Cal Ripken Jr.

In an interview with Sirius XM’s Michael Wilbon, Ripken said that were he in Strasburg’s position, he’d use the Nationals’ all-but-inevitable appearance in the playoffs as justification to stay in the rotation until season’s end. After all, there’s no guarantee the Nationals will be as hot next year as they have been this year.

The Post’s Dan Steinberg caught the segment:

“It’s perplexing because the competitor in all of us will say, ‘Wait a minute now,’” Ripken began. “You know, I understand the rationale for this, and I understand the future, and I understand what they’re doing. And I think they’ve put themselves in a position where they’re not going to turn back from it. [Mike] Rizzo’s not going to change his mind….

“If I was Stephen Strasburg, it’s not a foregone conclusion you’re going to get back to this position in another year,” Ripken continued. “I won the World Series in 1983 with the Baltimore Orioles, and I thought that would just be one of many opportunities. And we never got back all the way through.

“In some ways, you want to live in the moment, but I can certainly understand their caution,” Ripken concluded. “But I don’t think they’re going to turn back. We might hear from Strasburg a little bit. If it was me, if I was Stephen Strasburg, I’d be making a lot of noise, saying, ‘I’m pitching.’”

Well, well, well. This is a good argument. Then again, it does come from the player who played 2,632 consecutive games between 1982 and 1998. So, one might think that Ripken is filtering his argument through his streak that is likely to stand unmatched throughout baseball posterity.

But Ripken isn’t some old meathead like, say, Tim McCarver, the retired catcher and Fox Sports commentator who has taken to grousing about the shutdown even when he’s not calling a Nationals game. Though Ripken commiserates with Strasburg’s desire to stay on the mound, he realizes Nationals General Manger Mike Rizzo is going on the advice of Strasburg’s doctors who fixed up his young arm two years ago.

The Nationals, Thomas Boswell wrote the other day, might be at their best with Strasburg in the rotation. But even without, they’re still pretty damned formidable. And it seems like Ripken understands the carefulness with which the Nationals want to treat a prized ace who is finally fully recovered from career-jarring surgery.

Good on you, Iron Man.