By Adam Forsyth

Brett Anderson – Starting Pitcher

Oakland is a team that is not scared to take a risk, especially with young, talented pitchers with tremendous upside. Now, by risk, I’m only suggesting that they definitely aren’t afraid to allow a 21-year old left-handed phenom take the hill and make 30 starts in his rookie season.

There is always concern in the follow-up season where a pitcher makes a big jump in IP (as Anderson had never thrown more than 120.1 innings in a season prior to 2009’s 175.1) however, don’t always assume the worst as many pitchers have had success after jumping in use.

We expect this former Arizona Diamondbackprospect to be one of those success stories. His stuff was dynamic more often than not, (with an exclamation point on his complete game 2-hit gem in July at Boston ) and he’s certainly got the goods to be a top of the rotation starter for a long time.

Although, I’m sure in typical Billy Beane, Oakland A’sfashion - he’ll be collecting most of that top of the rotation salary wearing the duds of another major league team!

With the addition and unknown status of Ben Sheets to the A’s rotation, expect Anderson to be heavily relied on to make another solid 30+ starts and pencil him in as a solid low end number three starting pitcher (or maybe even a SOLID number four, depending on the depth of your league) as his control is phenomenal and should allow him to continue his statistical rise.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 1:10 am and is filed under Pitchers, Sleepers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.