CC Sabathia

The season is finally over for CC Sabathia and now comes the greatest time in the year for him and his agent, FREE AGENCY!! In the off-season Sabathia will garner plenty of attention from the big salary teams and maybe even a few small market teams might throw something in just to show their fans they "tried" to land the big fish.

The problem I see with Sabathia is the tremendous workload he took on this season. He pitched a total of 253 innings in the regular season and another 3.2 innings in the playoffs. Simple math and that comes out to be 256.2 innings pitched in 2008. 256.2?!?!?! holy shit, that's a lot of innings and you still haven't added in the really high pitch counts he threw during those innnings. During his stretch with the Brewers he basically threw 110-130 every game.

Over his entire career this guy has been a work horse and has found a way to stay off the DL. Since 2001 he has pitched at least 180.1 innings and peaked at 241 last season. So, I guess the added 15.2 innings isn't huge but in my eyes this has to take a toll.

I know there is an argument between traditional guys and current guys with respect to the innings. The traditional coming with the old guys use to pitch 300 innings every year and didn't worry about a pitch count while the "newbies" baby their pitchers. I kind of lean towards babying them by watching their pitch counts, especially early in the year. Anyways, this talk belongs in another post.

Fantasy baseball information time. People should be drafting Sabathia as a 2nd/3rd rounder next year. BUT, I would be a little skeptical on his performane just because of his added workload over the past two season. But again, there are special guys out there, for example Roy Halladay. If it wasn't for all those freak injuries he would be throwing 30 starts every year as well. Draft him because if you don't someone else will because anchoring your rotation with Sabathia isn't the worst thing in the world.