Over at The Outside Corner today, Garrett Wilson has a look at six-man rotations across baseball (I’ll post the link when it goes live at one) this year. I think it’s an interesting concept, especially because it might be time for the Pirates to try something like that out. In their rotation right now, only Paul Maholm has ever topped 200 innings in a season and he’s only done it once. The Pirates are already dialing back Charlie Morton’s innings and Jen Langosch says they’re talking about doing the same for Kevin Correia. They’ll almost certainly have to with Jeff Karstens at some point this year, who’s already within 50 innings of last year’s combined total between Indianapolis and Pittsburgh (138) and James McDonald, who’s similarly close.
With Brad Lincoln coming up on Saturday to pitch part of the double-header vs. the Nationals, why not just leave him up and in the rotation? The Pirates can either go straight to a six-man rotation, or they can use Lincoln to allow guys to skip starts more regularly by subbing him into the rotation for a different pitcher every time through. Lincoln’s pitched pretty well in Indy this year, despite his semi-high ERA; his walks and home runs allowed are both down pretty significantly from last year’s numbers and his strikeouts haven’t dipped much. With the possibility existing for some rotation turnover next year, it’d help the Pirates to have a better idea of what Lincoln’s really capable of in the big leagues with Ray Searage, and it’d keep pretty much every one of their starters throwing deeper into the season.
It’s not something the Pirates necessarily have to do, and I’m sure they have a better idea of the rotation’s limits and what their inning goals are for the season than I do, but I think it’s something at least worth considering, especially with the lack of durability that the club has with four of the five starters that they have right now.
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