How confident do you feel in Duke?
Posted By Jeff Fletcher on March 3, 2009 2:35 pm
Perhaps lost amid the flurry of A’s free agent signings (they reportedly agreed with Nomar Garciaparra too), is that Justin Duchscherer still isn’t right. Duchscherer went to see a doctor about his elbow today.
The A’s keep sending out those “nothing to see here” signals, using lots of words like “precautionary” and “normal.”
Honestly, though, how confident are you feeling about Duchscherer right now? It’s not as if the guy has a clean medical record. To be fair, he’s still got time to be ready for opening day, because the season is still more than four weeks away. In a normal spring, exhibition games wouldn’t have even started yet.
However, right about now, if I’m the A’s, I’m wishing I would have signed a veteran starter like Randy Wolf or Jon Garland. Even if no one were to get hurt, it would have been good to push all those other guys a little more. And if one of the established — well, established being a relative term with the A’s — guys got hurt, you’d still have someone.
I toyed with a lot of questions I wanted to ask here, but I went with this one…
Loading ...
who cares?
I care.. I love my A’s.. but I am getting worried about The Duke…
If they had gone to arbitration this is the stuff that would have been thrown at him. He has the same problem that most slightly built pitchers have and that is they have to tax their bodies so much that they tend to breakdown. We’ve seen it happen time and again with both Hudson and Harden.
It would certainly be nice to hear its nothing but his track record has to lead us to believe he’s going to miss time because of this.
I don’t think you can ever be all that comfortable with guys that have a track record of injury. The only guy they’ve had that I never worried about is Zito who is just a complete freak of nature.
My guess is Eveland or Gallagher gets the nod if Duke isn’t available. With the richness of pitching they have I’m not really all that worried about Duke not being there. They have some veteran leadership in the bullpen this year that should be able to help out the young guys.
i want the DUKE!
As an A’s fan, my response is a lot of “Who cares?” too. This season is not as dependent on the starters as before, and I’d rather have Duke miss Opening Night and be healthy June-November.
The A’s go 12 deep at SP with Duke, Eveland, Gallagher, Braden, Williams, Gio, Edgar, Outman, Mazzaro, Cahill, Anderson, and Simmons, and all of them have the potential to be very good for an extended period of time. The bullpen is lights out, Chavez and Ellis healthy means there’s 3 gold glove caliber defenders in the infield with Holliday, Suzuki, Sweeney, and Buck being very good too, and the home park gives the pitchers extra outs. If the biggest question mark is in the rotation, I like the A’s chances of the ball bouncing their way.
We’ve seen this before with Harden, right? “There’s some soreness, but he should be fine” … “He’s going to miss his next start, but its just a precautionary move. He’s going to be fine” … “He pitched in the bullpen and was still sore, he’s going for an MRI to see what’s going to happen.” … “He’s going to miss a few weeks, but its not serious.” … then no word, he’s put on the DL, and we don’t see him for 6 months.
If Duke is healthy by the All Star break, I will be shocked.
I think Eveland will end up with the opening night nod, and I pray that Billy finally goes out and gets another starter. Maybe Pedro if he looks good at the WBC…I’m not sure anyone else is out there. Or maybe you just call up the new big 3 and let them have at it. Needless to say, I’m a wee bit concerned about the rotation right now. Here’s to hoping Gallagher and Williams, and the Gonzalezes all immediately live up to their potentials.
I think Gallagher will start on opening day because from what I remember from last season he had better stuff than Eveland and more potential. But I don’t really feel comfortable with any of the starters. I agree that a stable veteran starter would be nice.