Per Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle, A’s lefties A.J. Puk and Jesus Luzardo will each begin a rehab stint on Tuesday with High-A Stockton. Puk will be making his first live-game mound appearance since undergoing Tommy John Surgery last April, while Luzardo, who’d been dealing with left shoulder soreness, will appear in an official game for the first time since last August.
Puk, a 6’7 lefty who was the sixth overall pick in the 2016 draft, had laid waste to the minors before his injury in the Spring of last season. His “double-plus” fastball and “vicious” (adjectives per Baseball America) slider allowed him to post double-digit strikeout rates in each of his three minor-league stops, culminating in a 61-inning stint for Double-A Midland in which the U of Florida product set down 86 batters in just 64 innings. It’ll surely be a lengthy rehab process for the projected ace, though it appears the club will use him in relief should he crack the majors this season.
Luzardo, a 21-year-old Peruvian-born hurler, was acquired in mid-2017 from Washington with Blake Treinen for relievers Ryan Madson and Sean Doolittle. Little known at the time of the deal, Luzardo has rocketed up prospect lists after dominating performances of his own the last two seasons. Baseball America ranked him as the top lefty in the minors after 2018, waxing especially thorough on his changeup, which the site ranks as one of the minors’ best. Shoulder injuries are always cause for serious concern, but if Luzardo can make it through his first few outings unscathed, he’ll be a strong candidate to crack what’s been a middling A’s rotation thus far.
Both should go to MLB after a week of minors games, there’s no way imaginable that Blackburn and Dull are better options right now. The A’s bullpen and backend rotation is a borderline disaster, even Treinen has a FIP of 4.14. Yikes. Talk about a team who should have locked up Kimbrel.
‘A week of minors games’ is like 2 for a starter. You have to be kidding unless you want to injure them again. It’s called rehab for a reason. 1 month minimum.
I’m convinced StrikeFour is a Giants developed artificial intelligence that takes every comment ever made about the A’s on facebook and twitter and uses an algorithm to make really uninformed comments on MLBTR. To what end? I don’t know, but no one can be this opinionated and not know what they’re talking about.
You have absolutely no idea how personnel management in baseball works. You’re always on here spouting nonsense about how, “well, in my expert opinion this team should have done this,” and it’s usually the A’s of all teams who you think will make a ridiculous move that they would literally never make. You’re armchair GMing a team that doesn’t operate the same as 28 other teams in baseball.
I will say the A’s have been pretty aggressive when it comes to high end pitching promotions, but this isn’t one of those cases. When we promoted Cahill, Anderson, Gray, etc., from Double A it was either out of necessity and when those players were healthy. Neither of the 3 had dealt with arm injuries in their professional careers and neither of them had come off major elbow surgery. They were healthy, and could pitch a reasonable and meaningful amount of innings.
Puk is coming off TJS and hasn’t pitched since spring training of last year. Regardless of how hard he’s throwing, putting him into a situation where he’d be pitching stressful innings isn’t exactly what you want to do with him. Luzardo is still just 21 years old and hasn’t pitched yet this year after getting shut down. They DON’T want him to come out of the bullpen, but he needs to stretch back out after not pitching for 2 and a half months.
Additionally you want to make sure they’re actually ready for the big time. The last thing you want to do is call them up, and have to send them back down. Letting them take lumps for absolutely no reason isn’t great for their mental health, and then you’ve got a roster crunch you really don’t want to deal with because you had to give them 40 man slots so they could actually join the 25 man roster.
As for Kimbrel, the dude was about as consistent a closer at the end of last year and in the postseason as Treinen is right now, and he cost the Cubs a pretty penny. The A’s weren’t going to invest $50M to outbid a team that is actually playing well. He also wasn’t really going to help us that much, because it isn’t just Treinen who is struggling right now. Our entire bullpen has the bug. It’s like signing a high end starter. What does that accomplish when the rest of our starting pitching is questionable or just downright bad?