Big Three Redux?

Oaktown Oaks — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:36:43 -0000

With all their talent it is very tempting to let Cahill, Mazzaro and Anderson pitch and pitch a lot. How best to use them and maximise their effectivness?

Cahill, Mazzarro, Anderson, probably nothing could be worse for this franchise than to over pitch and ruin those three young pitchers. With their success in this early part of spring it also must be oh so tantalizing to the A's brass to run those guys out there and see what they can do. All common sense tells you send those guys down let them mature and wait for another day. Let's throw out common sense for a minute and consider this.

The A's go to a four man rotation, two of those spots are made up of a tandem of Duchscherer, Cahill, Mazzaro and Anderson. Each tandem is strictly limited to 50 pitches, which would not over strain their arms, and still give them regular set work. This would result in roughly 120 or so innings for the year for each of them. The idea being build the young guys stamina and at the same time utilize their great talent and hopefully keep Duke pitching and off the disabled list. For your two other starters, throw in, Eveland and Braden, and strictly limit their pitches to 80 a game, which gives them roughly 200 innings for the season. That leaves probably 550 to 600 innings that need to be covered by the bullpen. I see the 25 man roster something like this

C Suzuki

C Bowen or Powell

1B Giambi

2B Ellis

3B Chavez

SS Cabrera

OF Sweeny

OF Buck

OF Holliday

DH Cust

INF Garciaparra

INF Crosby

OF Davis

INF Petit or Barton

SP Duchscherer

SP Eveland

SP Braden

SP Cahill

SP Mazzaro

SP Anderson

RP Gallagher or Outman or E Gonzalez

RP Gio or Springer or Williams

RP Ziegler

RP Wuertz

RP Devine

Harden the What If.

Oaktown Oaks — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 04:32:08 -0000

The frustrating thing about Rich Harden for me can be summed up in the following.

Per Baseball reference.com the most similar player to Harden at age 22 is Jake Peavy.

As you may know at 26 Peavy won the Cy Young, Harden will be 26 this year.

One can always dream.

SB Nation User Blog: Oaktown Oaks

Big Three Redux?

Harden the What If.