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
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Marcel predictions for the Oakland Athletics top five starters for 2008.
| Starter | Innings | ER | ERA |
| Joe Blanton | 194 | 90 | 4.18 |
| Rich Harden | 71 | 29 | 3.68 |
| Justin Duchscherer | 39 | 17 | 3.92 |
| Chad Gaudin | 148 | 70 | 4.26 |
| Gio Gonzalez | 121 2/3 | 64 | 4.73 |
| Totals | 573 2/3 | 270 | 4.24 |
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:
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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).