Arizona Diamondbacks Spring Training 2012: Questions Surround Starting Pitching

On the surface, the Arizona Diamondbacks starting rotation appears to be a position of strength. But concerns remain whether or not the Diamondback pitchers can replicate their 2011 performances.

Questions surround each of the starting pitchers.

Ian Kennedy emerged as a bona fide ace last season and had a career year.  Can he do it again?

Most likely Kennedy will not have quite as sparkling a season in 2012.  It doesn’t mean that he won’t perform like a staff ace, but expecting him to be in the conversation again for the Cy Young may be asking too much.

Daniel Hudson pitched over 200 innings for the first time in his career last season.  Is an injury on the horizon?

Notable baseball writer Tom Verducci has written about how pitchers under 25 who increase their workload by more than 30 innings from the previous season are at risk for injury the next year.

Hudson, 24, threw 95.1 innings in 2010.  He threw 222 in 2011.

Hopefully Hudson is able to avoid injury, but if he does become one of Verducci’s statistics the Diamondbacks at least have depth at the minor league level.

Will Trevor Cahill pitch like he did in 2010, with a sub-3.00 ERA, or will he replicate 2011 with an ERA over 4.00?

Likely Cahill will be somewhere in between. 

In 2011 Cahill’s worst outings came against the Tigers, Yankees, White Sox and Red Sox.  Three of those four teams were three of the four highest run-scoring teams in baseball last season.  I’ll let you guess which team was the odd one out. 

Cahill will not be tasked with taking the hill against those elite offensive squads now that he is in the comfort of the NL West.  The Diamondbacks’ interleague opponents for 2012 are coincidentally the AL West teams, the teams that Cahill is most familiar with and had success against in 2011.  

The same question can be asked of fellow former AL West pitcher Joe Saunders.  Which version can we expect to see?

Saunders has pitched six years in the major leagues and had a sub-4.00 ERA only twice.  One of those times was last season.  Will he be able to keep his ERA low in 2012 or will he revert to the mid-4.00 ERA that he has had most seasons of his career?

My opinion is that he is closer to 2011.  Saunders’ numbers last season likely were helped by playing in the NL West.  Three NL West teams were in the bottom 10 in baseball for number of runs scored.

Josh Collmenter emerged from nowhere last season and had instant success.  Will hitters in 2012 figure him out?

This is the question that can’t be speculated on—we just have to wait and see what happens. 

I didn’t expect Collmenter to finish last season as a member of the Diamondbacks rotation, yet there he was. 

I also didn’t expect the Diamondbacks to win the division when the season started, yet they did.

Hopefully 2012 exceeds expectations as well.