No one who could have or should have avoided it has thrown a pitch in anger in four months, and nobody's arm is likely to be taxed even nominally until at least the Ides of March, but 60 or 70 pitchers are going to start the baseball season on the disabled list.

You can write it down. And that's at the minimum.

All over Florida and Arizona this week, the game's managers and general managers and accountants, especially the accountants, will hold their collective breath as their pitchers climb mounds again and return with ... oh man, they don't even want to know.

Inflammation?

Some guys would kill for inflammation. They've got tendonitis, bursitis, bone spurs, bone chips, torn labrums, torn rotator cuffs, etc.

And that's just in their non-throwing arms.

In the case of the Pirates, with Kip Wells gone to bigger and better disabled lists with the Texas Rangers and now the St. Louis Cardinals, the leading candidates for staff-curdling breakdowns are right-handers Tony Armas and Shawn Chacon, both said to be competing for the ever-unpopular fifth starter role.

Armas' arm, surgically repaired, held together long enough for him to make 30 starts last year for the Washington Nationals, including the one in which he allowed 10 hits in 1 2/3 innings at Florida Aug. 23. Chacon, pitching on a chronically painful knee, had a 6.36 earned run average last summer for the New York Yankees and the Pirates, having arrived in the deal that sent Craig Wilson to Gotham for a latte.

"Chacon pitched very effectively for the Yankees [in] the second half of '05," Pirates general manager Dave Littlefield was saying on the phone from Bradenton yesterday. "He's in a free-agent year, so we're very anxious to see if he can get it back. Armas was really a top flight guy as a young pitcher. He's still only 28, and he's another full year removed from the surgery.

"There are always a lot of good stories in baseball. People like Salomon Torres, Freddy Sanchez, Ronnie Paulino, guys who have talent but get sidetracked somehow, then come back and do some things that not a lot of people expected they could do. We're hopeful that Chacon and Armas can be two of those stories."

Well put me down as someone who's glad to hear that, because contrary to the established wisdom and the viciously tiresome reflexive fifth-starter debate, there is plenty of room in the Pirates' starting rotation for both Chacon and Armas, and maybe even for Marty McLeary, and possibly even for Shane Youman, and don't make me go Yoslan Herrera on you.

Maybe it's because Littlefield went in and out of the annual winter meetings without wavering on the notion that his so-called top four -- Ian Snell, Zach Duke, Paul Maholm, and Tom Gorzelanny -- were essentially untouchable. And, maybe it's because young players with real promise have been so rare in this market for most of the past decade that we tend to overreact when we finally see one (Oliver Perez), but by any lucid analysis, the theory that the top four on Littlefield's staff are an established component of a competitive Major League club is only that -- theory.

Littlefield, to be perfectly accurate, has said before and repeated again yesterday that the top four should take nothing for granted, but really, what would make them think otherwise?

The Pirates had one regular starter finish among baseball's top 50 in earned run average (Duke was 48th at 4.47). Duke and Maholm, who combined to go 11-3 in the second half of '05, went a combined 18-25 last summer, their first full season in the big leagues, which included a combined 4-19 away from PNC Park.

Maholm's strikeouts-to-walks ratio (117-81) was perfectly dreadful, but at least he finished in the National League's Top Ten in hit batsmen. (He also, according to baseballprospectus.com, fashioned the year's longest HBP, plunking the New York Mets' Lastings Milledge with the 12th pitch of his plate appearance. Way to go.)

Beyond that, Ian Snell's "breakout" summer, in which he went 14-11, merely makes him 15-14 for his career. Maholm and Gorzelanny are a combined 13-17.

"As I look at it, those are four young guys who've shown enough that we want to be able to count on them in the future," Littlefield said. "I respect their professionalism to the point that I don't expect them lay down or mail it in and assume anything. They're 23, 24, 25 years old and they've only had one year or a little more in the big leagues. A lot can happen."

You would hope.