Athletics left-hander Jesus Luzardo has been on the shelf since testing positive for the coronavirus July 7, but he has recovered from the illness. Luzardo has been cleared to practice and will rejoin Athletics Summer Camp on Friday, Martin Gallegos of MLB.com tweets.
One of the game’s absolute best pitching prospects, health issues have beset Luzardo over the past year-plus. The A’s hoped he’d be a significant contributor last season, but he ended up missing a large portion of it because of rotator cuff and lat problems. Luzardo was able to make his much-anticipated major league debut in September, though, and the down-the-stretch results he recorded were spectacular. The flamethrowing 22-year-old made six appearances from Oakland’s bullpen and put up a 1.50 ERA with 12.00 K/9 and 2.25 BB/9 over 12 innings. He added three more frames of scoreless, one-hit ball with four strikeouts and two walks in the A’s wild-card game loss to the Rays.
From a long-term standpoint, a best-case scenario for Oakland would see Luzardo turn into a front-line starter. As far as this season goes, though, it’s unclear how the A’s will utilize him. Because of the time he missed, pitching coach Scott Emerson suggested this week (via Matt Kawahara of the San Francisco Chronicle) Luzardo could fill a short-inning role, at least initially, saying: “It’s just a matter of when we get him on the team, do we start him two innings or do we use him more in a leverage situation and maybe pick his days that he gets to pitch?”
Assuming Luzardo won’t be in their season-opening rotation, it seems likely the A’s will come out of the gates in 2020 with Mike Fiers, Sean Manaea, Frankie Montas, A.J. Puk and Chris Bassitt as their starting five.
Go get ‘em Baby Jesús!
Yes! This staff has the ability to be great!
Athletics have the ultimate edge.
Team to add JESUS !!
stinks he cant start right off. hurts his RoY chances.
So if he is diagnosed positive on July 7th and is returning to summer camp July 17th; I guess the 14 day waiting period is no longer an item. Just keep testing 2 or 3 times a day and once there are 2 negative tests back to back ; then back to playing with the boys you go. I think that would make me nervous as a player yet to test positive for fear of a potential false negative compounded with my fellow player not even waiting the full 14 days. Oh well…
14 days really doesn’t mean anything, like 6 feet. its a precaution that fills a void. many guys have it for more than 12 days and some only have it for a few. sure its possible that you get two false negatives, but you have to get them in a row and the second has to be at least a day later. in fact, if you want to feel fairly sure about any day’s result you would want to take at least 3 that day and take the consensus, meaning you would need 4/6 tests to have false negatives to return to action. even if you had a relatievely high false negative rate you’d still need to get lucky 4/6 times to slip through the cracks.
It was announced on July 7th that he has tested positive (which I believe requires at least two, if not more positive tests to confirm the first is not a false positive), but it doesn’t say when the positive tests were administered. There’s probably at least a 2-3 day lag in that timeframe I would guess. After the first positive result, they remove the player but don’t count him as a true positive case until it has been confirmed with another positive test, so it’s really hard to know the exact number of days it took to ‘beat’ the virus.
With that said, I’m so happy he’s been cleared to play again. Look out for the A’s this year. They have the full package to compete for the AL West (SP, BP, defense, offense and power) and if they can keep this core together and healthy, they will be very good for years to come.
Always been a fan of Jesus Lizard
Telegraphing his pitches that clearly an Uncle Charlie