Felix Hernandez is up to around 225 innings this year on a Mariners team that has been going nowhere since about five minutes after camp broke. As a result, the M’s are going to give him six days rest between starts for his next two starts. Which is a smart move. He’s the future, and the present is pretty meaningless for the Mariners.
Of course, this will likely put a bullet in his Cy Young hopes. It was already a tough road for King Felix, what with the fact that he’s not good enough to somehow force his teammates to score runs for him, but this makes it rougher. Not that it should. Even with CC Sabathia’s great outing last night and Hernandez’s not so great one his last time out, it would take a boatload of scoreless innings by the former and three or four straight implosions by the latter for the numbers which matter to begin to even out.
But, for a healthy number of writers with Cy Young votes, there’s the dramatic narrative to consider. That narrative today says “CC Sabathia pitched a gutsy eight shutout innings in a pennant race last night, and the next day we learn that the sabermetric darling needs extra rest.” If the win totals weren’t enough to persuade these guys to vote for Sabathia, the narrative almost certainly is.
