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...As I pointed out at MC, we have three pitchers who could probably throw 200 innings if needed and two of them aren't all that great.
Felix Hernandez
Ian Snell
Doug Fister
Everyone else has absolutely positively NO SHOT to throw any more than 160 innings. Tops.  Morrow has had elbow trouble twice in the past and has never thrown more than 140 innings in a season, even in college.  Ryan Rowland-Smith lost half of this year because his arm was too tired from throwing like 120 innings in 2008...LOL  No one wants to see the Mariners wind up relying on Snell and Fister as the innings eaters unless they actually EARN that with great performance.  And no one should be crying about it if Snell and Fister both end up in the bullpen for some of the season because we're tooling around in our fragile but awesome hot rod Lincoln.  The only CORRECT solution for the Mariner rotation until we have a solid #2 to back up the King is to sign eight starters instead of five.
Felix Hernandez (240 innings hard on the barrelhead - costing roughly 12 mil)
Rich Harden (120 innings - costing roughly 8 mil)
Erik Bedard (120 innings assuming he gets back in June - costing roughly 3 mil plus incentives)
Ian Snell (150 innings - costing 4.25 mil)
Ryan Rowland-Smith (120 innings, some out of the pen - costing 0.8 mil)
Brandon Morrow (100 innings, some out of the pen - costing 0.5 mil)
Doug Fister (100 innings, some out of long relief - costing 0.45 mil)
Luke French or Jason Vargas (80 innings, mostly as LOOGY, spot starts - costing 0.45 mil)
I'm getting 1030 innings from my rotation (some out of relief, but still)...it costs me about 30 million dollars (not out of whack for what needs to be spent on a contending rotation), and 90+% of those starts are made by players who I trust to keep me in games (Felix, Harden, Bedard, RRS) or at least who I want to develop (Morrow, Fister, Snell).
The chief complaint with this rotation is that it lacks guys who go deep into games and will stress the bullpen...I would counter, however, with the fact atht for most of the year, two or three starting pitches will be in that bullpen and available to take 2-3 inning relief appearances (Silva, Fister, French etc) as needed.
In a volatile buyer's market, the correct game-theory-driven strategy is to buy as many undervalued commodities as you can...there's no reason NOT to buy Harden AND Bedard.

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