Watched: Edwin Jackson

Last night I was watching the Cardinals/Royals game when they broke away to show a highlight of the Arizona Diamondbacks at the Tampa Rays. The highlight was with two outs in the eighth inning and a runner on first for the Rays. The runner was Carl Crawford, pinch running. Crawford was thrown out attempting to steal, ending the inning and preserving a no-hitter for D-Backs pitcher Edwin Jackson.

I quickly decided to switch to the D-Backs game (a decision made quite easy by the frustrating way the Cardinals were losing to the Royals). I then was able to watch the end of Edwin Jackson's no-hitter, which marks the first time I have witnessed the end of a no-hitter as it happened.

There are a couple of remarkable things about this particular no-hitter. First, Jackson was not dominant in the early going. He walked seven batters in the first three innings, including walking the bases loaded in the third inning before he recorded a single out. But he was able to work his way out of trouble each time and didn't allow another walk until there were two outs in the ninth inning. An 8 walk no-hitter isn't totally unprecedented, of course. When AJ Burnett threw his no-hitter in 2001, he walked 9 and Nolan Ryan walked 8 during one of his no-hitters. What seems unusual is, like Burnett, Jackson struck out fewer men (6) than he walked (Burnett only struck out 7 in his 9 walk no-hitter).

The other remarkable thing is that Jackson threw 149 pitches in the game, the most in a game by a pitcher this year. While going for a no-hitter trumps the usual concerns over pitch counts, there is precedent for such an effort basically ending the career of a promising young pitcher. In 2001 rookie Bud Smith threw a no-hitter for the Cardinals in September and threw 134 pitches in that game. The Cardinals skipped Bud's start after that game in order to allow him to recover and Bud was effective in three of his last four starts that season.

The next season, though, he was mostly ineffective in 12 starts for the Cardinals and then was sent to the minors (where he did have some success in 6 starts). Then he was traded to the Phillies in exchange for Scott Rolen and Bud's arm trouble started shortly thereafter. He was injured for the better part of the rest of his career, which never again reached the major leagues.

There is, of course, no way to correllate Bud Smith's arm injuries to the strain of pitching the no-hitter that September night, but a look at Bud's numbers from 2001 combined with how his career turned out at least raises the issue. Bud was 22 years old that year and, in his first season of enduring the stress and strain of pitching in the major leagues, he was asked to throw more than 90 pitches in 7 of his 14 starts (including over a 100 in 4 of those starts), crowned by his 134 pitch no hitter. Maybe Bud's arm would have fallen apart anyway, but a workload like that for a young pitcher certainly couldn't have helped.

So will Edwin Jackson suffer the same fate? Only time will tell, of course. Jackson has some advantages over Bud: he is 26 years old and has been pitching in the major leagues since he was 19. This is already his fourth season of being a full time starter at the major league level and there is something to be said of the body becoming conditioned to the workload. Jackson has thrown over 100 pitches in 12 of his 16 starts this season, including 10 in a row (and a 123 pitch effort on June 2nd). Last season he threw over 100 pitches in 21 of his 32 starts, including a season high of 132 on May 21. So maybe Edwin Jackson is a horse that is capable of throwing tons of pitches every time out. Or maybe Jackson is headed for a burnout. Again, only time will tell.

A Far-Reaching Trade

I read today that the Arizona Diamondbacks have reached a six year agreement with their young outfielder, Chris Young. Young is an extremely talented young player - he hit 32 homeruns and stole 27 bases last season as a 23 year old rookie. His on-base skills have yet to develop at the major league level, but his minor league history seems to indicate that he will improve in that area.

While Chris is an interesting ballplayer and I think the D-Backs will get good value out of this contract, what I find most interesting is how he got here. Chris was drafted out of high school by the Chicago White Sox and was their top prospect. After the 2005 season, however, the White Sox traded Chris to Arizona. You may recall that the White Sox won the World Series in 2005. Apparently, they believed that the key to maintaining their success was to upgrade their pitching. So they traded Chris, Orlando Hernandez (a key to their pitching staff, but one that was already at least 39 years old), and Luis Vizcaino to Arizona for Javier Vazquez. Vazquez was enigmatic, pitching well for Montreal from 2001-2003, but struggling with the Yankees and Arizona thereafter.

Two months into the 2006 season, the D-Backs flipped Orlando Hernandez to the Mets for Jorge Julio. Julio finished the season with Arizona, but they then traded him to Florida in exchange for Yusmeiro Petit. At the time Petit was a young starting pitching prospect with a lot of upside, but his K/9 rate has dropped his last two seasons in the minors (in truth his rates began deteriorating much earlier - maybe Florida knew something before they traded him).

Luis Vizcaino, the other piece the D-Backs received with Young, was flipped to the Yankees before the 2007 season as part of the trade to acquire Randy Johnson. So, to sum up, the Diamondbacks gave up a talented, but enigmatic starter in the prime of his career for a potential 30/30 outfielder just about to break into the major leagues, a fringy pitching prospect at the cusp of the major leagues, and a spare part used to acquire a once-dominant hero of the franchise that could still be a quality starting pitcher if used properly.

I would say that the D-Backs "won" the trade, although it is certainly a defensable move by the White Sox if Vazquez becomes an anchor of their staff and leads them to the playoffs. How much better would the Sox have been last year if they had Young in the outfield instead of Scott Podsednik, Jerry Owens, etc.? How much better would they be this year with Young? Instead, they were forced to trade four prospects to shore up their outfield: three to Oakland for Nick Swisher and one to Arizona for Carlos Quentin.

Trades like this one fascinate me because of the domino effect with the other trades that occurred and because so many of the names involved are impact players.