So, today is the Opening Day for most of the league. And since the A’s took their silly little jaunt over to Japan last week, they have the day off for an extra rest of something, even though they’ve already played three exhibition games since returning.
You may have heard that on this silly little jaunt to Japan, the A’s actually performed like a competent baseball team, take away one boneheaded HR given-up by Huston Street and one really stupid base-running error by Emil Brown, I would have been really, really happy, though it likely wouldn’t have lasted. If you flip back through previous posts in this blog, you’ll see that I wrote a fairly lengthy preview of how I believe the team would do this season. I was probably a lil’ hard on them, but I’ll stick with my assertion that the Oakland A’s should be happy if they end up with only 90 losses.
I also speculated that if key players on the team performed with any sort of respectability, they would likely be traded. Which brings me to the point of this post: should the A’s trade Rich Harden or keep him? Dude was an absolute monster in his Japan: six innings, 9 strikeouts, and one run. And if he doesn’t hang that one pitch to Manny, there’d have been no runs. Maybe Japan is like the Bizarro Canada for Harden; Rich can’t buy an out each time he pitches in his native country. As it begins every year, when the guy is healthy, he’s got Top 3 stuff in the entire majors. Of course, “stay healthy” is the key here, as in it never frickin’ happens.
Rich Harden is clearly the player on the A’s roster with the most upside; no player is as potentially good at what he does as Harden. Guys with his time of stuff only come around once every 10 or 15 years, and there’s nobody with his potential in the A’s newly-stocked farm system. All that upside is awfully tempting to teams that will likely be good this year. Sports writers and columnists have been writing since last year that the A’s should bite the bullet and trade him while they still can, before he ends like Kerry Wood (a very injury-prone closer) or Mark Prior (an injury-prone starter on another team).
It’s not like there isn’t precedent for the A’s trading or shedding pitchers with tons of upside and having it work out. Back before the 2005 season, the A’s traded Mark Mulder to the Cardinals for Dan Haren, Kiko Calero, and Daric Barton. Haren was every bit as good as Mulder during 2005 and MUCH better in 2006 & 2007 (not hard to do, because Mulder spent those seasons injured), Calero’s been a solid set-up man/middle reliever, and Barton looks like he’ll be pretty good now that he’s finally in the majors. They also let Cy Young-winning Barry Zito walk to the Giants before the start of the 2007 season, and he proceeded to start the following year, and as I type this, is in the process of being slapped around by the Dodgers (four runs in three innings thus far). In general, besides Johan Santana, pitchers with tons of upside end up breaking your heart.
And in spite of all of this, I still think the A’s should keep Harden. For one, if you try to trade him to someone like Yanks or Red Sox, you want be getting back nearly enough of value in return. Their minor leagues systems are decimated because they keep on trading all their prospects to make their July-pushes, trading to lousy teams who don’t have a plan of fielding a competitive team anytime soon. And as I said earlier, a pitcher like Harden simply won’t be coming around our way any time soon, so the team should try hold onto him if they really want to try to make this team competitive after this season. As much as I like Blanton, workhorse inning-eaters like him come around far more often. They’ve probably got a few of them in the pipeline right now. They got anyone else with a 98 mph fastball and all sorts of other nasty stuff at his disposal as well? Nope. Billy Beane needs to resist the temptation and hold onto him in hopes of him finding a way to stay healthy.
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