Certainly the A’s went out and improved their rotation this off-season, but as they look to compete against the rest of the AL West they don’t win every comparison.
For your Opening Day starter would you rather have Luis Severino or Jacob DeGrom? Advantage: Texas. For 2025 would you sooner have Jeffrey Springs in the rotation or Framber Valdez? Springs is exciting to have, but the Astros have the SP you’d choose. Would you trade JP Sears for Logan Gilbert if you had the chance? I think you would.
The A’s can’t even boast the division’s best overall rotation front to back, as the Seattle Mariners can lay claim to one of the better rotations in all of baseball. And yet there is indeed an area where the A’s might be “best in the West” — and it could wind up being the most important area of all.
Welcome to 2025, where 1/3 of pitchers undergo Tommy John surgery and the short list is the one showing your healthy pitchers. Did you know the average number of starting pitchers a team will employ throughout the course of a season these days? If I heard correctly it’s 13. Google’s very thoughtful AI says 11-12. Either way…that’s…insane.
It could also give the A’s a key advantage in the division. The first question posed was whether you would want Severino or DeGrom pitching game 1. But if DeGrom pitches a shutout on Opening Day, then makes 7 more starts and then goes on the IL never to be heard from again in 2025, it’s Severino who is going to provide more value, more wins, fewer games started by a minor league call up who didn’t crack the original 5.
The A’s presumed “first 5” will include Severino, Springs, Sears, and Osvaldo Bido. Given his overall success last season, for now let’s award the #5 spot tentatively to Mitch Spence.
If the average team needs 11-13 SP to navigate through 162 games, it’s fair to assume most teams will need contributions from their “second five,” i.e., #6-10 on the depth chart. Here is where a big weakness gets exposed for teams otherwise expected to contend. The Rangers are a prime example, with plenty of talent in their rotation (Nate Eovaldi, Jacob DeGrom, Cody Bradford, Jon Gray, Kumar Rocker) but very little behind them (Dane Dunning, fresh off of a season with a 5.31 ERA, looks like the #6 SP, while Tyler Mahle has thrown all of 38.1 IP the last 2 seasons combined, and then it gets really ugly).
I won’t go through each AL West team’s SP depth chart, partly because it’s hard to gauge just glancing at the 40-man roster and guessing about lesser known prospects. Suffice it to say that no AL West team has depth that will make its fans sanguine about losing 3 SP to injury by mid-season — and yet that is a likely scenario. (Especially if you’re the Rangers and are banking on DeGrom and Gray as 40% of your rotation).
The point today is that the A’s are in a particularly strong position with regard to the “second five” depth chart. Their #6-10 looks roughly like this:
JT Ginn
Joey Estes
Brady Basso
Hogan Harris
Gunnar Hoglund
Ginn pitched well in his maiden voyage, accruing 0.4 WAR in just 8 appearances (6 starts) with a solid 4.24 ERA.
Estes has had his struggles for sure, but nonetheless is a pretty good depth piece as a workhorse (24 starts, 137.2 IP) who throws strikes (1.90 BB/9IP) and he was just 22 in his rookie season.
Basso is polished, pitched well in his cup of coffee with the A’s last year, and could arguably be a candidate to win the #5 spot if there were room.
Harris is hard to assess in that he is inconsistent and might be stretched out to start but might also be utilized in the bullpen. But the stuff plays and you could worse for a fill in for an IL stint.
Hoglund might be shooting up the depth chart like wildfire, given that he was clocked at 95-97MPH in his Cactus League debut. Hopes and expectations for Hoglund have been very tempered, but if his velocity really is back to pre-TJS levels then his ceiling isn’t “solid back-end SP”. He has always had excellent command and solid secondary offerings. When he was throwing his fastball in the mid-90s Hoglund was a 1st round pick out of high school and then a 1st round pick again out of college. If he continues to throw 95+MPH it’s conceivable he could rise to be more than a “depth piece” — he could soon vie for a spot in the middle of the A’s rotation.
Of course in this list there is plenty of uncertainty and potential for failure. But would I swap these 5 for any group of 5 that don’t break camp in the rotation of another AL West team? Nope. And if it’s inevitable that every team will find itself scraping the barrel for SP #7….SP #8…..SP #9……There are realistic scenarios where the A’s, sometime mid-season, have the best rotation in the division.
Obviously some of this depends on who goes down and who doesn’t. Gray and Rocker going on the IL is different from Eovaldi and DeGrom. And for the A’s, what happens with Severino and Springs is going to be key.
But still. #8 SPs are a thing and the 162 game season is a marathon, not a sprint. I like where the A’s are positioned for this marathon. Do you?