My assignments just get harder and harder. This time my job is to try to tell you what to look for in 2009 out of perhaps the most unknown of quantities on the Cubs roster this year, Rich Harden. I honestly have struggled for the past few days on how to approach this, because predicting what kind of season Rich is going to have is probably the most inexact science I have ever attempted.

What I settled on doing to is to simply run through a list of things we KNOW about Rich Harden and his upcoming 2009 campaign:

• When healthy (or even close to it), Rich Harden is one of the hardest pitchers to hit in all of baseball
• He’s healthy about as consistently as a love child of Mark Prior and Kerry Wood if the child were coached from age 4 by Dusty Baker
• He enters the 2009 season knowing he has a tear in his throwing shoulder that can only be fixed with an operation that would knock him out for 18 months, but he believes he can pitch effectively with it
• Rich made more starts (25) and threw more innings (148) than he had since 2004, and did it all with the aforementioned tear in his right shoulder
• He turns 28 this season, the time when most pitchers can expect to hit their prime
• When he pitches, he’s going to strike out a lot of people and throw a lot of pitches to the guys he faces, but does not go deep into games
• He was 19th in strikeouts (181) in MLB despite not qualifying for the ERA title
• He was third among pitchers who threw 100 innings in pitches per plate appearance (4.13)
• Guys who put the ball in play are probably going to hit it in the air (only Chris Young had a lower ground ball to fly ball ratio among pitchers with 100 innings), which will hurt you at Wrigley (although Ted Lilly is redefining how much that really does hurt you)
• Rich saw his velocity decline in September, took a couple weeks off, and got a cortisone shot before looking bad in game 3 of the NLDS
• In June-August, Rich made an average of over 5 starts, struck out 11.8 batters/9 innings, and walked 3.2 batters/9 innings, all while sporting an ERA of 1.84 or lower in each month
• In September, Rich made 3 starts, struck out 7.4 batters/9 innings, and walked 6.4 batters/9 innings, while sporting an excellent (but not as good as the previous months) ERA of 2.65
• 2009 is a contract year for Rich that will likely determine whether he will be doomed to a constant stream of one year contracts for the rest of his career or if he gets a multi-year deal from the Cubs or someone else
• If ever a pitcher was going to get the white gloves treatment over course of a season, it’s going to be Rich Harden
Put all this information together and you have a pitcher who needs to have a good 2009 and a Cubs team that needs that pitcher to have a good 2009, but more importantly a good Fall in 2009. What I take away from all of this is that there is NO WAY that Rich Harden tops his number of 25 starts last season.

The Cubs are the favorite to win the NL Central with or without Harden (at least in my opinion), so the Cubs wouldn’t trade 12 good regular season starts for 1 good October start. For that reason, expect six days of rest between starts to be the norm, expect skipping his turn once in a while, expect shutting him down for a couple weeks at least once this year.

For that reason, the guys who miss out on the fifth starter spot should not resign themselves to an inning or so every other day, because there are going to be plenty of starts out there for a sixth starter. In my opinion, that’s why getting Chad Gaudin in the Harden trade was so brilliant. He’s the perfect insurance policy for Harden. He’s flexible, he’s used to both starting and relieving, and he’s effective at both. I would put the over/under on starts for Chad Gaudin at 15 this year, and I am more than happy having him out there.

I digress…Chad Gaudin will have his day in a couple weeks, this is about Rich Harden. What I expect out of Rich Harden is for him to be good when he takes his turn, but I don’t expect him to take his turn regularly. The Cubs are going to do everything they can to make it so that his best outings come late in the season, and we will see if that is possible. The idea will be to minimize his trips to the disabled list, and that will place some serious strain on the bullpen, and I think that’s part of the reason why the Cubs have been hell bent on building right handed bullpen depth this offseason.

Here’s a look at Rich Harden’s career numbers and the numbers I expect out of him this season:

As you can see, I’m not too optimistic about how much and how often Rich will hit the mound (how could you be optimistic about a guy’s durability when you see that picture), but like I said, the regular season is not going to be how Rich is measured. Fortunately the Cubs have some depth behind Rich Harden, so I think they will be able to weather his lack of reliability.