The A's have had an awful time keeping their starting pitchers healthy. In April it looked like they had one of the best pitching rotations in the game -- something that could compete with the Phillies, Braves or Giants, but for a fraction of the cost. Since then, Dallas Braden, Brandon McCarthy, Tyson Ross, and Brett Anderson have all been injured. It's been an unbelievable stretch of bad injury luck.
Rich Harden: Fact Or Fiction?
Rich Harden is pitching for the Oakland A’s tonight for the first time since 2008. Here’s a look at some truths and non-truths about his career.
If there's something of a cavalry, then, it's prodigal son Rich Harden, who returns to make his first start for the A's since 2008, when he dominated the American League en route to being traded to the Cubs, where he was hurt.
Harden has now been hurt for three different teams, and there’s no question that his legacy is as a great-stuff/fragile-arm pitcher. Here are a some pieces of Rich Harden facts and fictions:
Fact: According to Baseball Prospectus’s injury history, Rich Harden has been injured for 758 days during his career.
Fiction: Rich Harden has never been injured for 758 consecutive days.
Fact: If you have some sort of Texas Instruments graphing calculator or supercomputer, you can create an algorithm to determine how many starts he’s missed. I found the time to do so. If you assume a five-man rotation, and note that he’s missed a total of 555 games according to that same injury history, that means he’s missed approximately ... hold on ... carry the five ... 111 starts.
Fiction: Rich Harden has only made three starts in his career, but they were really, really impressive, and that’s the only reason why people keep talking about him.
Fact: If you take those 111 missed starts and assume he would have pitched as well as his career averages, he’d have a career 94-58 record with 1495 strikeouts.
Fiction: It is completely accurate and sabermetrically sound to just extrapolate numbers like that.
Fact: If Rich Harden had pitched 1500 innings with his current career ERA+ of 122, he’d be the 56th starting pitcher in history to do so.
Fiction: Rich Harden has pitched 1500 innings.
Fact: Rich Harden came into the league in 2003. He has appeared in 155 games and made 145 starts. Jered Weaver came into the league about halfway through 2006. He has made 161 starts.
Fact: Jered Weaver is the #2 most similar pitcher to Harden on Baseball Reference’s Similarity Scores list.
Fiction: There are several things about those last two facts that make A’s fans happy.
Fact: Harden missed six days in 2004 with a shoulder subluxation
Fiction: In 1998, I saw Subluxation open for Morbid Angel and Napalm Death.
Fact: These before/after graphs of the A’s rotation are completely accurate:
Fiction: He’s totally pushed graphs like that in a positive direction before.
So it’s new ground for Harden. He’s a healthy pitcher replacing the injured ones. And if he has anything close to his former stuff, he’ll be a pretty nice fill-in for the A’s, and might even be a tradeable commodity in a month. Because if there’s one thing that the Gambler’s Fallacy has taught us, it’s that when a guy gets hurt as much as Harden, there’s no way he’ll get hurt like that again.
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