Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
March 02, 2008
Rotation Evaluation, Oakland Athletics

The series looking at team pitching rotations using the Marcel the Monkey projections continues with the Oakland Athletics. Their starters posted 4.29 ERA in 2007, fifth in the American League.

Note that in figuring ERAs, I'm using Marcel's mIP and mER columns. The ERA listed in the spreadsheet uses the average of mER and bsrER. I wanted to avoid posting 1/2 runs in the table. Pitcher order is taken from the CBSSportsline depth chart. Marcel does not have a prediction for Gio Gonzalez, so I went with his PECOTA.

Rich Harden

Rich Harden
Photo: Icon SMI

Marcel predictions for the Oakland Athletics top five starters for 2008.
StarterInningsERERA
Joe Blanton194904.18
Rich Harden71293.68
Justin Duchscherer39173.92
Chad Gaudin148704.26
Gio Gonzalez121 2/3644.73
Totals573 2/32704.24

This is a rotation in flux. The most optimistic outlook is that both Harden and Duchscherer recover from their injuries and give the Athletics 160 innings at those ERA levels. Given that Harden hasn't qualified for the ERA title since 2004, I don't think Oakland wants to push him beyond that level. With Duchsherer coming out of the pen, the A's won't stretch him too much either. I expect to see a lot of starts by a lot of rookies this season as Oakland tries to figure out what their rotation of the future looks like. I'd put that 4.24 ERA at the optimistic end of the projection.

Previous posts in this series:

The Baseball Musings pledge drive continues through March. Please consider making a donation.


Posted by David Pinto at 11:28 AM | Team Evaluation | TrackBack (0)
Comments

David,
I like the evaluation series, but shouldn't you be addressing park factors as well? Without it some of the rotations come out looking a lot better/worse than they actually are (especially the Pads).

Posted by: Justin at March 2, 2008 02:43 PM
Post a comment









Remember personal info?