Will Carroll has his team team health report up for the Cardinals. I suppose the only real news is that Eckstein is listed as "red", whatever that means. Carroll being Carroll, there are a couple of things I feel compelled to address.

First:

It's a bit more shallow in the pitching end of the pool, where the team is starting the season with Morris on the DL and, beyond Ankiel, there's nothing even remotely ready. Go ahead, tell me who the next starter would be if someone went down in spring training.

Probably Anthony Reyes, maybe Adam Wainwright or Chris Gissell. Carroll doesn't mention Reyes or Gissell, which probably tells me all I need to know, but I'm sure he's not the only one stuck on the idea that the Cardinals don't have any pitching depth. Gissell won't get any Cy Young votes, but somehow he managed a sub-4 ERA in 200 innings at Colorado Springs (elevation 6000+ feet) over the previous two seasons.

Reyes is the real one to watch however. Consider this comparison between Reyes's time at AA in 2004 and the record some other pitcher, let's call him Mark Cosbi, had at AA a couple of years ago:

Name  IP  ERA   K/9    BB/9    H/9
Cosbi 35  2.60  14.3   2.6     6.9
Reyes 74  2.91  12.4   1.6     7.5

Sample size caveats and all that, but they're reasonably similar. Cosbi, of course, is actually Mark Prior in 2002, who after three starts at AAA then had a stellar half-season with the big club (3.32 ERA) in 2002 and was the best starter in the National League in 2003. Reyes didn't pitch especially well at Palm Beach before his AA stint, but (a) 2004 was his first season in pro ball and more importantly (b) he had some physical problems that apparently cleared up, at least temporarily. There's an obvious danger from this kind of comparison (see Brendan Harris), so I'm not claiming that Reyes is the second coming of Mark Prior. In fact, I won't even claim that Reyes is as good as that stat-line suggests, but I'd much rather have Anthony Reyes as my first guy up than Sergio Mitre.

Carroll also said of Jason Marquis:

The year after cracking the 200-inning mark is a big test for pitchers, so watch him early.

I haven't seen any study that backs this up, so I ran a query on the Lahman database. Here's a summary of what I found for what pitchers did in the years after they threw 200 innings:

Time     #      Avg IP  Agg ERA
#       P's       X+1     X+1
1	627	  187    3.81
2	424	  199    3.71
3	330	  198    3.60
4	245	  205    3.62
5	178	  204    3.59
6	128	  199    3.56
7	 95	  202    3.55
8	 66	  223    3.41
9	 55	  194    3.37
10	 34	  211    3.34
11	 27	  195    3.60
12	 20	  196    3.59
13	 13	  196    3.49
14	  9	  205    3.49
15	  7	  212    3.40
16	  6	  165    3.92
17	  3	  206    4.14
18	  2	  218    4.08
19	  2	  173    4.76
20	  1	  192    4.70

The first column breaks down pitcher-seasons by the number of seasons the pitcher has made it to 200 innings. For example, 2003 was the third season Brett Tomko threw 200 innings (gosh, did he really torture us that many innings?), so his 2004 season goes in row 3. 1998 was the first season Tomko threw 200 IP, so his 1999 season goes in row 1. Between 1954 and 2003 there were 627 different pitchers who threw 200 innings in a season. After their first season of 200+ innings they averaged 187 innings with an ERA of 3.81. Compared to years beyond, that's a little low innings-wise and a little bad, but not dramatically so.

The three main reasons why a pitcher wouldn't have thrown 200 innings prior to year X, and why he would throw a lot of 200 inning seasons in general, are (1) he's not talented enough -- call it the Jason Simontacchi Reason -- (2) he's hurt a lot -- call that the Donovan Osborne Reason -- and (3) he's been too young -- call that the Felix Hernandez Reason. Reason #3 obviously doesn't apply to Jason Marquis and, as far as I can tell, neither does Reason #2, since Marquis has had only two trips to the DL since being drafted in 1996, once in the minors (strained abdominal muscle) and once in the majors (elbow tendinitis), neither particularly serious. So really we're back to Reason #1, whether Marquis is that talented. Maybe Carroll has something to back up his statement, but I'm not seeing anything special here.

Oh yeah, my queries unearthed only one pitcher who has thrown twenty 200 IP seasons. My first guess was Cy Young, but he only had 19 of those seasons... and none of them were after 1953 anyway. I'll let people guess who that guy is (and, yes, he threw 192 innings in the year after his last 200 IP season).