Folks, folks, folks. If you can’t conjure up a worthy candidate, at least have some sense of drama and decorum. Cole Irvin: traded. Paul Blackburn: Injured. James Kaprielian: Recovering.
So the A’s Opening Night SP was going to have to be someone new and not really a natural choice to start the first game of the season. And it wasn’t even going to be Drew Rucinscki, who at least had 41 MLB games under his belt, as he rests a tender hamstring.
Circumstances, one by one, left the A’s with really only one obvious choice and that was to offer the media spectacle, and likely big fan draw, of matching up Shohei Ohtani with fellow Japanese import Shintaro Fujinami.