I LEARNED A FEW THINGS FROM IT AS WELL.  BUCK HAS USED HIS FIRST OPTION YEAR THIS YEAR.  INTERESTING...

Gaudin is not young; 24 is not considered young for a pitcher.  Generally you don't want guys who are 22 or younger pitching 200 innings but Gaudin will be fine.  We might want to rest him with some skipped starts but to have him sit out for the rest of the season?  He needs to be ready for next year.  Haren was pitching a lot of innings both from college and in the pros and (knock on wood) he's been nothing but durable and healthy.  Same with big Joe.

Also, we will have an opening at first base this year.  We might as well get Barton up here now because he needs to be ready for next year.  Dan Johnson will not be here next year.  So your alternative is to either have Barton up with hardly any big league experience next year or acquire a veteran.  I don't like either of those options.  Give Barton some time and he will hit if he's ready.  If not, we will be able to give him enough ABs to at least get some positive experience.

It's not just his age, it's the jump in innings pitched over what he's pitched the last couple of years.  I would let him get to 175 and save that arm for next year.  

Whether to call up Barton depends on what they plan to do with Johnson and whether they plan to compete in 2008.  If Johnson has poor trade value, then you may as well keep him through this year and let Barton come up in May or June of 2008 so that you can delay his free agency for a year.  If the A's plan to trade Johnson and have Barton play 1B in 2008, and plan to compete in 2008, I would bring up Barton and let him adjust to the big leagues this year so that he will have the best chance of success in 2008.  Same goes for Suzuki.  If the A's plan to be competitive in 2008 with Suzuki, he needs to be playing now.  

get him out in the fifth or sixth inning even if he's having a good game if our relife core looks better, give him an extra days rest every other week, skip a start here or there, hell send him to the bullpen the last month but shut him down completly? who does that?

As far as Barton is concerned we have already played 45 people this year so that would mean if the team was 100% healthy, about 20 of them would still be in the minor leagues. So we give 20 guys a chance but not our best prospect because he's our best prospect and we dont want him to possibley have
to face failure?  Lets find out THIS year the plan for first base NEXT year. I say bring him up for sure and give him his cup of coffee. If he fails he fails, better luck next time. If he gets messed up in the head about it then he wasnt that good a prospect to begin with. I don't neccesaraly buy the arguement someone sucks forever  because the team brought him up too early.  Unless the A's think he's our 21st best prospect stop treating him with kid gloves.

but I disagree with the Gaudin conclusion. I'm a lot more willing to sit tight on the Daric Barton situation. Johnson's fine enough that there's no urgency to trade him, and even if they do, Swisher is a capable first baseman. They've already got 5 good hitters for 4 slots (Cust, DJ, Swish, Stewart and Buck) so that a trade of one or the other of DJ and Stewart just wouldn't affect things that much. Piazza is still a factor if a slot opens for him as well. I'll defer to the A's development staff here-- if they want Barton to develop power in AAA, great, if they think he can handle big-league pitching and will keep developing in the Show, great. He's so young that there's no sense of urgency; I don't think he's Rule 5 eligible until after the '08 season, at which point he'll obviously be on the 40-man roster.

Gaudin... I disagree with. I don't disagree at all with DLing him for tired arm at some point if he has a few ineffective starts. But shut him down for the year? At that rate (30 inning increase each year) it would take him until 2010 to build to a full big-league season!

Caution is one thing, and certainly caution is a good thing to exercise, but being afraid of bumping a pitcher from relief to starter work isn't caution, it's being scared of your own shadow. 150-175 innings seems like a good target figure to me, with expectations that he'll reach 200 next year barring injury.

What I agree most with in this really intelligent analysis is that the A's should be, above all, forward looking right now. Don't gamble anything on this season because it's going nowhere near the playoffs. (Last year, with a nearly equivalent record I said the opposite at the same point in the season for obvious and, it turns out, correct reasons: weak division, return of Bradley, Frank Thomas, healthy bullpen, Zito--none of which exist now.)

One difficulty with your point about Gaudin, of course, is that all the knowledge in the world--and let's just assume you're dead on about his workload--doesn't do much good when put up against the public skepticism and the individual player's disbelief and anger that would certainly follow. The A's would be mocked roundly in the media unless they could paper over what they were really doing with some mystery, dead-arm injury. And Gaudin himself would (and should) be outraged. Such a move would likely cost him money--or it would certainly appear to to him. If Gaudin weren't a real, self-interested individual that wouldn't be a problem. You could just treat him like the commodity he would be and do whatever is in the A's interest. But it doesn't work that way. Consider the ludicrousness of how the save rule and the salary and ego ramifications that flow from the largely bogus save stat dictate non-optimal pitcher usage and you'll get what I mean.

As for Barton. Leave him alone. Nothing would be gained by bringing him up this year unless you believe it will make him a better player in the years that are to follow. Right now, I can't see how that would be true.

Seriously, the Royals don't seem to need him.

  You can be sure the A's are watching Gaudin closely but I don't sense that he's doing anything more than trying to navigate himself through a season as a starter. I think he's ahead of  Blanton in his 1st season as a starter and I would place him somewhere around Blanton's development last season in terms of effectiveness. His motion doesn't strike as being as hard on his frame as I see with Harden. The other issue is that he should continue to progress and mature through the school of hard knocks and Beane is willing to allow him elbow room to do that.

  Great stuff about options. I've been thinking about this stuff for years and I appreciate your explanation. The A's historically haven't burnt up too many players when it came time to bring them up. I don't think we have to worry about Barton either. When he comes up, it's b/c Beane has the confidence that he's going to be here for a long time. The characteristic of our ballclub in early part of this decade was how many good young talented players were up here all at the same time. Barton is part of the next generation to come up under the same philosophy Beane has implemented.

But does anyone have some information on how many innings Gaudin has pitched per season including those innings thrown in the minor leagues?  I have a sneaking suspicion that he has thrown 150 innings at some point in his career.  If so what does Wil Carrol's analysis say about a pitcher that goes from 150 innings , back down to 80, then back to 150 again?

And these are probably the stats that the front office is going over as we speak, if not earlier in the season.  They expect a drop off and they are probably trying to get another starting pitcher to get us through this hell of a season...arg

Options are not vague and are easily understood. You have three option years...not three options.  Barton can be sent up or down as much as possible during his first three years of service. And they're not explained or tracked online? try these:
ESPN explaining it
Baseball Prospectus explaining it
Even Wikipedia gets in on the action...

The reason they're not "tracked" is because there is no "number of options". "Out of options" is a figure of speech-and a bad one at that.

As for Gaudin, I disagree too. The number of innings pitched is less harmful to a pitcher than the number of pitches per start in the long run. Obviously not all pitchers are created equal; we know this because Harden gets hurt no matter what.  But this great article describes the main threats to a pitchers long term health.  Gaudin only averages about 91 pitches per start, which means if he's an average pitcher he shouldn't be too affected by his workload this year.

good amount of information there

Jeans, very well thought out and presented.

First Gaudin:
Your premises vis a vis Gaudin are based on statistical information that simply doesn't apply. When talking about young pitchers and increasing the number of innings, you're talking here apples and oranges. You cannot compare the work load of a reliever with that of a starter. The routine is different, and the arm use is different. A starter goes every fifth day, and pitches a lot of pitches. A reliever goes perhaps three days in a row, makes fewer pitches each day but is consistently getting up and throwing. The number of relievers who became starters and increase their innings in that way is too small a sample size to determine what effect the increased innings will have on the arm. Period.
Second, you say that he is a "young" pitcher and the statistics reflect "young" pitchers. Well, no. The statistics reflect pitchers generally much younger than Gaudin.
In order to make the conclusions you make, the statistics would need to be about (1) pitchers who used to be starting pitchers then become relief pitchers and then starters; and (2) pitchers 24 years of age with several 150 inning seasons in their past. The sample size, I'd assume, is WAY too small to make any conclusions. Also, Geren isn't looking at innings, he's looking at pitch counts, which have remained in the 90-100 range for every single one of Gaudin's starts.

Essentially, what you're saying is that it is necessary, in every case, for a reliever who is turned into a starter who is the age of 24 to be shut down midseason.

That's ridiculous.

Second, Barton.
I understand your concerns about options. But when dealing with a player like Barton, options aren't an issue, just as they aren't with Buck. If Barton is going to need all his options, then most likely he's not going to be a superstar. The real question is control, and if the A's bring him up now, they'll have the same duration of control as they would if they bring him up to start the season in April. I say bring him up now and let him get adjusted to the majors.

I was perusing Barton's splits on MiLB.com, and remembered the point in this diary about Barton not hitting lefties well.  It seems that he's hitting lefties about as well as righties this year, albeit with a little less extra-base power: Barton at MiLB.  So if the point was that he hits LHP significantly worse than RHP, I'm not sure that's supported by the evidence from the current year.

I do, however sympathize with the idea that Barton should be kept at AAA until he's mashing; or, more specifically, shows more HR power, since he's shown all the other skills at the plate so far.  On the other hand, I wouldn't want him to stagnate in the minors at such a young age, so I think bringing him up after he's safe from Super-2 arb. status next year would be good timing for a call-up, with continued success in the line-drive stroke and improvements added in hitting the ball out of the park.  

I'm also thinking that it would be prudent to keep DJ around at the same time, unless they get an offer they can't refuse for him.  Having DJ, Barton, and Cust to rotate at 1B, DH, and the occasional OF appearance for Cust would help with to keep the pressure off the rookie and safeguard against injuries depleting the roster.