One little pitch...muhahahaha, two little pitches...muhahaha, three little pitches...muhahaha and all the way up to 120 pitches plus. That's a lot of Transylvania laughs.
But that's also been the A's MO the last two games. Zito went 126 pitches in Texas. Haren went a career-high 122 last night. And why not? Zito has proven that he's durable enough to handle it. Haren had been pretty unhittable until last night. And the bullpen is anything but secure.
My only problem is that most A's pitchers have been handled with kid gloves, so the sudden increase for them could potentially only cause more problems later. The last thing the A's need to have happen is for Zito and/or Haren go down as soon as they get Fragile Rich Harden back from the DL. Because it could wind up becoming a season long issue. I understand the need to try and right this ship right now, believe me, I'm just nervous that if we start sending our pitchers out for 120+ pitch games that it's just going to get worse.
Then again, I can imagine being in Macha's shoes and looking down at the bullpen and seeing Randy Keisler, Steve Karsay and Ron Flores warming up, then pausing and saying, you know what, Barry, why don't you just keep going? Dan, you're young, right? Keep going, big guy.
I understand that the pitch counts are a cumulative count and not game-by-game, but the sudden appearance is that Macha might be considering throwing that out the window for now.
If he does, it could be...One little pitcher on the DL...muhahahaha, two little pitchers on the DL...muhahahaha. Course, that is kind of what it already looks like right now.
