Right. Although curious whether Texas augments its philosophy in light of the fact that Feliz had TJ surgery this year, Colby Lewis is out for the year, and Holland spent time on the DL too. My guess is no, because the Ryan/Maddux philosophy is that pitchers need to throw to develop arm strength, that learning how to pitch with fatigue helps prevent injuries, and that you have to treat each individual pitcher differently, because one guy might expend more in 85 pitches than another does in 130 (agree 100% with the last notion).
I knew that Lewis was out but hadn't realized that Holland has spent time on the DL. As I stated in my earlier post, it will be interesting to see what happens with all their pitches with this philosophy.
Lets not forget the arm problems suffered by Feliz and Ogando by having them switch from reliever to starter.
If a prospect has the potential to start, that is what he should do. Hands down, no questions asked. GM's and managers that want to bring up top tier starting pitchers to help in the bullpen should be immediately shit canned. Bullpen arms are so much less important than starting pitchers, and also loads easier to find, not to mention the performance of a reliever fluctuates more than any position, much like place kickers, from year to year. You can always move a failed started to the pen afterwords, it's much harder to start in the pen and move to a starting role, you have to expand your repertoire, scale back velocity, pitching in the bullpen early usually stunts your growth as a pitcher, destroying endurance and scaling back your pitch selection to maybe 2 pitches instead of 3 or 4. In my opinion you can pluck relievers off the scrap heap and convert failed minor league starters with enough "stuff" into short roles in the bullpen.
If you have an elite pitching prospect, and you can get 175-225 innings a year out of them, why would you prefer to get only 50-70 innings? All of this applies to Garrett, as by all accounts he has very serious major league velocity. Maybe he becomes an elite starting pitcher, but if not, you can always stick that 97mph heat into the bullpen and you can have yourself something, even if it never works out in the rotation.