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Community Discussion: Rookie pitching staff for post-season

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Your challenge: build a rookie pitching staff for the post-season.

Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports

Good afternoon prospect watchers. With the minor league season complete, but the Arizona Fall League not yet begun, we will move away from having a daily Gameday thread and into more of a community discussion format with threads that will run for multiple days. The daily Gameday concept will return when the Fall League gets going and there are prospect performances to talk about.

For our first discussion question, I am going to give you the roster of the Los Angeles Dodgers. You have all the hitters that the Dodgers currently have, and you are going to the 2013 National League playoffs. But instead of having the real-life Dodgers pitching staff, you have to build a roster out of nothing but major league rookie pitchers.

Some caveats to make it more challenging. You do NOT get to keep Hyun-Jin Ryu; you cannot pick any pitcher currently in the Dodgers organization. Also, you can't pick any rookie pitcher from any of the other National League playoff teams, which for this exercise are assumed to be the Braves, Cardinals, Reds, and Pirates. That means you CANNOT pick Julio Teheran or Shelby Miller or Trevor Rosenthal or Gerrit Cole or Tony Cingrani or any of their rookie teammates.

Any other National or American League rookie or prospect pitcher is available for you, including anyone in the minor leagues and not currently in the majors. Your roster must include

***Five designated starting pitchers
***Six designated relief pitchers

This doesn't mean that all six "relief pitchers" have to be actual relievers: you can use a starter as a reliever if you want to.

I assume everyone will want Jose Fernandez and he is available, but it gets tougher from there. Build your staff! Can you get to the World Series with the Dodgers hitters and a bunch of rookie pitchers?