Which A's Are Helped, Hurt By Shutdown?

The Oakland Athletics roster will look different whenever it is baseball resumes than it would have if the season had begun on time.

The shutdown of Major League Baseball doesn’t strike every player equally.

Take the Oakland A’s. For some, like Stephen Piscotty and A.J. Puk, the pushing back of the start of the season as baseball’s first step toward combatting the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic could get both men ready to resume their assigned roles by the time the season actually starts.

For others, like Seth Brown and Chris Bassitt, things just became a little knotty.

Piscotty has been fighting oblique and rib problems that kept him out of all Cactus League games. Now that the Cactus League has been cancelled and the start of the season has been pushed back from March 26 to at least April 9, he essentially gets and extra four weeks to recover, then get his body into playing shape.

Oblique injuries are historically slow to heal, so there’s no telling if Piscotty will be ready whenever it is that the A’s and MLB start back up, but at least now he has a shot, where there was no chance for him to be ready by March 26.

That’s made the possibility of Brown, a backup outfielder, earning a roster spot to open the season a little more problematic.

The plan had been for Mark Canha to move from left field to right to fill in for Piscotty to start the season. That would leave Robbie Grossman and Chad Pinder in left fielder, Ramon Laureano in center and Brown, who hit 37 homers in the minors last year, with an opening to make the team as a backup outfield. If Piscotty returns, Brown’s chances dim.

Puk came into the spring as one fifth of the starting rotation. After two starts, he’d thrown three shutout innings. But before his scheduled third start, shoulder problems cropped up and he was scratched. It was only after renowned orthopedic specialist Dr. Neil ElAttrache, working out of the Kerlan-Jobe Institute in Los Angeles, told the club that he’d found no structural damage in Puk’s shoulder, that the team feels comfortable moving forward.

Even so, enough time had lapsed that Puk wasn’t likely to be able to build up enough arm strength to get stretched out to be in the rotation. The plan was that he would likely begin the season in the bullpen, mimicking the role he had when he was promoted to the big leagues late last summer.

Bassitt, who has always identified as a starting pitcher and who started in 25 of his 28 games last year, was told to be ready to open the season in the rotation. Bassitt said he was ready, that his prep work all along was designed to make him able to contribute either as a starter or a reliever. If Puk is now going to be ready to go, Bassitt almost certainly is consigned to the bullpen.