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Also at BJOL, and moshing off the previous question with a hip bruise, is ...

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Just when you think you've got Billy Beane stuffed back into the '00's, he powerflushes Gio Gonzalez, Rich Harden, Trevor Cahill and Josh Willingham.  And wins 93 games with the scraps.  Behind Bartolo Colon (now Brett Anderson) and Brandon McCarthy, he's had

• Tommy Milone with a 130:33 control ratio
• Travis Blackley :- ) with a 118 ERA+ (that's Travvy in the pic, for those just joining us)
• A.J. Griffin is 6-0, 1.94 in eleven starts
• Jarrod Parker, the FOURTH young starter into this cage match, is 11-8, 3.51

It isn't that rookie pitchers can't win the pennant for you.  It's just that we've never seen it in Seattle.  Our nervous systems are conditioned to believe that players out of Tacoma are not going to help us -- not immediately anyway, that's fo sho.  But yeah.  There is such a thing as a rookie who kicks tail and takes names.  There is such a thing as seven (7) rookies who kick tail and take names.  Yoenis Cespedes, Josh Reddick, Chris Carter.

A picture's worth 1,000 words.  Billy Beane is into pictures more than he's into MLB(TM) pedigrees.  Could Erasmo, K-Pax and Hultzen go nutzoid in 2013?  If this were Oakland, Billy Beane would be wagering his paycheck on their doing exactly that.

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By the way, we saw Danny Hultzen at Cheney this year, his first or second game... never got around to writing it up.  One thing that was going on was that the AAA batters hated to swing at his pitches.  It's 93 MPH sidearm, right on the black, or right off the black, and they're not going to swing, either way.  If a dude that vicious is going to walk me, hey, I'm rescued.  Hultzen walked like 5 guys that day, but his control wasn't bad at all.  It was hitters never swinging, it was hitters missing when they did swing, it was PCL umps, and it was the fact that Danny Hultzen won't give in.

He's got a funky delivery and he's got a little work to do.  If he's going to insist on painting all the time, his command has to hit the "HAIR-FINE" notch on the meter.  The umps want rookies to go Here It Is, Hit It and Danny Hultzen doesn't have a Here It Is, Hit It bone in his body.

Fans don't understand why a Tim Lincecum can walk 4-5 guys in college, or Kerry Wood can walk 6 in AAA, and then they get to the majors and the BB's take care of themselves.  Hultzen's and Paxton's walks are no big thang.  Their pitch arsenals, however, are.

Be Afraid,

Dr D