Perhaps the "conservation of mass" also applies to health, and Eric Chavez' progress is my kiss of death. It seems that an old pinched nerve injury from 1999, one that makes typing even more painful to do than it is for you to read, has reduced me to being the blogger that Daniel Day Lewis will play in the movie (there will be a movie about AN, right?), as I am currently typing with my right hand and my left foot.
So if you don't hear as much from me in the next couple weeks, that's why. And what great timing, as I am supposed to type 138 student report card comments this month. I'm considering just pasting "Doing gud" 138 times; do you think anyone will mind? It's either that or go with "blogger Tommy John surgery," in which they take the "g" on the keyboard and graft it next to the "n" -- bloggers generally come back from it typing just as fast but their accuracy is sometimes compromised.
What did you get from all this? That's right -- it's 1999 again, baby! Now onto baseball, right after this jump...
Billy Beane has alluded to how the A's have a wave of young pitchers (Anderson, Cahill, Gio, Mazzaro), followed by a wave of young hitters (Taylor, Carter, Cardenas), coming up about 2 years apart. Kind of the opposite of the early 2000s, when Chavez, Tejada, Giambi and company preceded the "Big 3" by a couple seasons.
One difference is that the A's seem to have intentionally separated the two this time, by pushing Anderson and Cahill more than they had to. Rather than just criticize or question the way it is playing out, I first like to try to understand it. Because in April, 2009, it was easy to see that by the time the A's best hitting prospects reached Oakland, Anderson and Cahill would be 2-3 years into their contract. So I'm trying to figure out why you might want that?
Do the A's feel that the pitchers will take longer to adjust to the big leagues, from the time they first arrive, than the hitters will? Or do they plan to extend the best pitchers beyond 6 years? Or do they feel that pitchers are such injury time-bombs that the best way to get the most out of them is to pitch them in the big leagues as soon as possible, because they'll probably get injured before they're 27 anyway?
None of those explanations seems especially compelling, yet neither does, "Well a lot of other guys were hurt so we went to those guys when they were 21 and we knew our best hitting prospects were 2 years away," or "We only wanted our best pitchers and best hitters to overlap for a couple of their best seasons."
Why wouldn't a rebuilding team want its best young pitchers and hitters to arrive, and mature, as close to the same time as possible? I don't have an answer -- I just know the A's are a smart organization and they probably have a better answer than I can come up with. What is it?