A couple of surprises today in Lakeland, Fla., as youth shall serve Detroit's pitching staff. The Free Press' Jon Paul Morosi:

At around 9 this morning, Rick Porcello and Ryan Perry walked into manager Jim Leyland's office. Together. When they emerged a few minutes later, the right-handers were met with curious stares. Their teammates, familiar with cut-day protocol, figured their faces would reveal what they had been told. For a brief moment, the two friends succeeded in stifling their grins. But there is no way to hide the emotion of life-changing news. Soon, they wore smiles more commonly found in college cafeterias from unshaven late-breakfast-eaters -- the universal expression of those who had a bit too much fun the night before. Porcello and Perry, two reasons for hope in an upside-down spring, had made the team. Later in the morning, team president/general manager Dave Dombrowski made it official: Porcello will be in the rotation, and Perry will be in the bullpen. Neither Porcello, 20, nor Perry, 22, have pitched above Class A. But team officials determined that they were among the 12 best pitchers in the organization. "You see Porcello and Perry walk into Jim's office like that, they're very impressive individuals," Dombrowski said. "They're talented. They're competitors. We think they give us the best chance to win." Porcello threw only 125 innings in the regular season last year, and Dombrowski acknowledged that Leyland will monitor his workload closely. --snip-- "I think he's ready. I think he'll do well. If he has some tough times -- every pitcher does -- I think he's mature enough to handle it. Is he a 100% finished guy? No. But he'll keep working on what he needs to work on. And he has a pitch that can help get him out of jams -- a very, very nasty sinker."

Oddly -- for a pitcher who just turned 20 and now is going to break camp in the big club's rotation -- Porcello is not generally considered one of the game's premier pitching prospects. Not by everyone, anyway. In Baseball America's Prospect Handbook, the three editors list him as the 10th-, ninth- and 11th-best pitching prospect. For whatever reasons, not a single 20-year-old started more than 20 games or pitched more than 99 innings in the 1990s. In the current decade, though, six pitchers have done both: Rick Ankiel (2000), CC Sabathia (2001), Jeremy Bonderman (2003), Zack Greinke (2004), Felix Hernandez (2006) and Clayton Kershaw (2008). And with the exception of Bonderman (6-19, 5.56 ERA) all of them pitched (at least) reasonably well in those seasons. For the Tigers, the most encouraging examples must be Hernandez and Sabathia, both of whom topped 30 starts and posted ERAs right around the league average. But it probably is worth noting that both had significantly more impressive minor league track records. At 19, Sabathia had struck out 159 hitters in 146 innings, including 17 Double-A starts. And King Felix's age-19 season had included a dozen major league starts with a 2.67 ERA. Porcello? He spent all of last season in the Class A Florida State League and struck out 72 hitters in 125 innings. His control was excellent, and he posted an admirable ground-to-fly ratio. I can't help but be reminded of Bonderman, though. Like Porcello, Bonderman was a first-round draft pick who skipped Double- and Triple-A and jumped right into the Tigers' rotation. Bonderman is just one pitcher and probably doesn't mean anything. I still would like to see more experience before exposing a 20-year-old starter to most of the best hitters on the planet. And speaking of experience, Perry has almost none -- a grand total of 14 professional innings. As a reliever, though, it's relatively easy to prevent him from being too badly exposed.