Thank you, whoever posted this, for taking down the HOF poll. It should have come down a week ago but I have not been able to get the poll edit tool to work right ....

By 'ace' I mean one of the best 14 pitchers in the AL for at least a couple seasons. By 'Javier Vazquez' I mean very successful pitcher who never quite lives up to his excellent K rate, due to idiosyncratic LOB% or HR/fly% problems. By 'Gavin Floyd' I mean the #3-iest #3 starter that ever did #3. By 'eternally frustrating' I mean he makes a living pitching just well enough to kill his team every year. 'Dynamite short reliever' speaks for itself. By 'R.A. Dickey' I mean he solves his hittability issues by becoming a knuckleballer and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. By 'Ace the Mascot' I mean his future will make Josh Towers' 2006 look like replacement level.

And I intentionally didn't give an 'other' or 'punt' option. I'm curious to see what we're all sincerely expecting.

And I'm the Vazquez vote.

There is a good reason for "other" in this case.  Nobody wants to say "a promising career completely derailed by injury". 

Morrow is likeable, has very good stuff, and could put it together, but frankly, the most likely outcome is actually a step backward due to injury.  After throwing 1200 pitches per year in Seattle, he's dialed it up to 2500 and now 3100.  If they try to get him to 200 innings, he's going to throw more pitches in a year than Roy Halladay does in 250 innings and I doubt whether his arm will be able to handle the load.  Of course, I hope that I am very wrong about this...

I would be much happier if there was another pitcher between Romero and Morrow/Alvarez in the rotation, as much because of workload expectations as anything else. 

The addition of the cutter could lead to more ball in play (on the ground) and less pitches per inning.

As they say, that cuts both ways.  The cutter could make him more efficient and effective. It also could lead to more stress on the arm and an even greater risk of injury.  I would guess that the second is more likely than the first, but nobody really knows.  And the payoff for the club if he is able to become more efficient and effective even for a limited period of time is potentially very large.

Perhaps one point of signing a bazillion relievers is to lighten the load on Morrow. "Just shut them out for five innings. If you're on 98 pitches by then, that's perfectly fine. In that case the old guys will take it from there." Maybe he's one of those odd pitchers who are tougher when they pitch away from contact.

That is probably part of the idea.  But, if your rotation includes Morrow, Alvarez, Cecil and McGowan, and you are planning to regularly cycle relievers in by the beginning of the 6th inning for an inning, you are setting up for sub-optimal performance.  There are other alternatives, of course.  Shuffling pitchers in and out of starting roles, as Whitey Herzog or Joe McCarthy might have done, would be one.  The presence of Litsch and Villanueva makes that a real possibility.  Or you could run tandems!  Alas, John Farrell hasn't shown yet that he could creatively deal with a difficult pitching situation presented to him by management. 

The cynical view of this off-season is that the GM has decided that if ownership is not going to come up with dollars, the only way to win is the Tampa Bay way, and there is no point in attempting this in half-measures.  Which leads to my song suggestion for today. 

I am thinking AJ Burnett

Just for the record, "Javier Vazquez" and "Eternally frustrrating" are practically synonomous.  If Floyd, as you put it, is the 3iest of 3s,  then J-Vaz wasm at this best, the 2iest of 2s with a heaping side order of "whyinhell can;t this guy be the 1 he should be?"