A’s bring Barry Zito back to major leagues

Barry Zito, who won the American League Cy Young Award in 2002 as a starter with the A’s, apparently will finish out his career in the Oakland bullpen.

The A’s called up Zito from Triple-A Nashville Wednesday with Oakland facing a shortage of pitching. Reliever Edward Mujica’s season ended with a strained right hamstring Sunday and Wednesday’s starter Jesse Chavez had to be scratched with a rib fracture.

The A’s also brought up Cody Martin to start Wednesday in Chavez’s place and brought back Zito to be another healthy arm out of the bullpen. He missed six weeks with shoulder tendinitis, but came back on the final weekend of the minor-league season to pitch one scoreless inning of relief.

Oakland wasn’t going to bring him up once the Nashville season ended, but the ongoing string of injuries to A’s pitchers changed their minds.

“We’re sort of in an all-hands-on-deck mode,” assistant general manager David Forst said from Midland, Texas, where the A’s Double-A team is in the playoffs. “We saw Mujica hurt on Sunday, then we learned about Jesse and the rib issue Monday.

“Put that on top of a 14-inning game (Monday) and we’re got a lot of pitchers who are worn out. So Cody will start tonight. Barry isn’t stretched out, but he can pitch out of the bullpen.”

There was some suggestion that Zito and another member of the A’s Big Three starters from a decade ago, Tim Hudson, might match up when Hudson, now pitching for the Giants, making an expected start against the A’s in Oakland the weekend of Sept. 25-27. Hudson has been one hoping that would happen.

“We have not discussed Barry starting,” Forst said about a Hudson-Zito matchup. “That hasn’t been what this is about.”

At this point, such a start would have to be limited to Zito pitching the first couple of innings with the A’s bullpen picking up the remainder.

Zito went 8-7 with a 3.46 ERA in 24 games, 22 as a starter. Injury problems limited him in August, but he came off the disabled list to pitch one scoreless inning of relief in the final weekend of the Sounds’ season.

“He really hung in there, even when he spent the last month on the disabled list, he was determined to come back and pitch one more time,” Forst said. “He had the respect of every ballplayer and staff member. You can’t question his commitment to the game.”

The left-hander out of USC was the A’s first-round draft pick in June, 1999, and pitched the first seven of his 14 big league seasons with the A’s before moving across the bay to finish up with San Francisco. He was a three-time AL All-Star and ranks fourth on the Oakland career list with wins (102), strikeouts (1096) and games started (222).

Martin will start Wednesday’s game in Chicago. It will be his second start for the A’s, having made his first big league start for Oakland on Sept. 1, giving up five runs in three innings to the Angels.

Chavez, who was placed on the 60-day disabled list in order to make room on the 40-man roster for Zito, joins a long list of disabled Oakland starting pitchers, including Jarrod Parker, A.J. Griffin, Jesse Hahn, Kendall Graveman and Chris Bassitt.

The A’s said Tuesday that Chavez has a non-displaced rib fracture, prematurely ending his season after he’d gone 7-15 with a 4.18 ERA in 30 games, 26 of them starts. The 15 losses are currently tied for the Major League high.

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