Chris Woodward on Starting Pitching Depth

Chris Woodward the media at Rangers mini camp on the importance of starting pitching depth

Transcript

00:00Yeah.

00:00Start of your opportunity.

00:02Obviously, as soon as we made the trade for Kluber,

00:05I reached out to all of those guys and just explained to them

00:09how important it is that they come in ready.

00:12Because you never know what's going

00:13to happen in spring training.

00:14Somebody could go down, heaven forbid.

00:16Two guys could go down.

00:17If these guys think, oh, I don't have a shot at making the team,

00:20all of a sudden, they're plugged into that role.

00:22The beautiful thing is when you have depth,

00:24it creates a lot of good competition below that.

00:28So whoever the sixth guy is, it's

00:30going to be a pretty heavy competition.

00:31He might actually start on our team.

00:33Somebody may not be ready for spring training.

00:35Or like I said, somebody may go down.

00:37And we're going to need nine to 10 starting pitchers.

00:40It's just a fact.

00:42If we don't, we're one of the few teams

00:44in the history of baseball that's

00:45ever gone through an entire season

00:47without having a sixth guy to pitch.

00:49So all those guys, it's a big year for all those guys.

00:52They've got something to prove.

00:53If they start in triple A, whoever's pitching the best,

00:56obviously who we trust the most, I guess, at the time

00:59is going to get the call.

01:01There's room for everybody.

01:03That's one thing I've stressed to them,

01:04to be ready to make sure that they're

01:06going to expect to make an impact on our big league team,

01:09whether that's in April or whether that's in June or July.

01:12A lot of that has to do with circumstance,

01:14but make sure that they're ready.