The A's Not-Quite-Odd-Couple: Puk and Luzardo

The two young starters are taking a page out of the Big Three's playbook, rooming together while trying to make impacts in the Athletics' rotation.

A couple of decades ago the A’s brought up within the space of 13 months a group of young pitchers who would go on to be known collectively as the "Big Three.”

Tim Hudson got the call first, in June of 1999, Mulder debuting in April of 2000 and Zito in July of 2000. They would go on to win 275 games for the A’s and 490 games for their careers. Mulder’s career lasted just nine years because of injury. Hudson, by then pitching for the Giants, and Zito faced off in the final week of 2015, after which both men retired.

During much of the time they pitched with the A’s, the three men were also roommates, sharing digs in the hills of the East Bay.

Fast forward to now. The A’s have two young pitchers who have come up almost simultaneously, A.J. Puk debuting last August and Jesus Luzardo about three weeks later in September. Neither started a game with Oakland, but that will change this year as both left-handers are sketched into the A’s starting rotation.

And, it should be pointed out, the two men are exploring being roommates. They split a place in Las Vegas last year and they are doing so again during spring training.

“We are looking into that right now,” Luzardo confirmed on the A’s first televised Cactus League game Saturday on NBCS-CA. “We lived all last year together and we’re living together now. We might end up doing that in Oakland.”

Everything old is new again.

Puk told NBCSCA that the arrangement actually started in spring training last year. The two pitchers weren’t on the A’s immediate agenda as they recovered from arm surgery.

“I asked if he wanted to come live in my spare bedroom while he was here [in Arizona last spring] rehabbing,” Puk recalled. “That’s how we got pretty close, talking about the future daily, how it could all happen.”

There’s nothing quite like bonding over adversity.

“It makes things a lot easier to have someone there that you can kind of talk to, and see that they’re going through it too,” Luzardo said.

While they are both young, hard-throwing left-handed starting pitchers, it would be wrong to believe that they are anything close to clones. Puk is 6-foot-7. Luzardo is 6-0. Luzardo, the first MLB player to have been born in Peru, speaks Spanish as a first language, although his English is first-class. Puk, Luzardo says, “he can’t even say `Hello’ in Spanish.”

But each are in the other’s fan club and support system, and that could be important as the A’s look to maximize performances from both men in 2020.