Remember Justin Duchscherer and Jack Cust? They'll be part of tonight's game against the Angels. But with Cust arriving, where does he fit in? The basic rule of thumb around baseball is that you wait 6 weeks into the season before passing judgment on the team, and you wait 2 months before passing judgment on individual players. We're at the 6-week mark right now.
So it makes sense that the A's, fresh off watching Joe Saunders shut the team out, officially acknowledged that the current lineup lacks, along with everything else, the ability to get on base or hit homeruns. Enter Jack Cust, but where? Here's one scenario that would be consistent with the "6-week / 2 months" principle:
Cust plays LF right now in order to bolster an offense currently featuring a LFer (Patterson), CFer (Davis), DH (Chavez), and 3Bman (Kouzmanoff) all with season OBPs under .300. Oopsies! Yes, Cust should be DHing but at the same time replacing Patterson with Cust upgrades the offense while trading one inept LFer for a slightly more inept one. The A's have a need right now in LF and Chavez hasn't had 2 months yet.
At the end of May two things will happen concurrently. One is that the A's will have given Chavez two months to show that he can('t) OPS more like a DH and less like a pitcher. The other is that Coco Crisp will return to give the A's an obvious choice in LF (someone who can actually field well).
Perhaps Cust will play LF for two weeks or so and then settle in to being the A's DH? Wherever he plays, he may not be the world's very best hitter but he just made the Rangers, Angels, and Mariners a little less comfortable.
