Did the Yankees Screw Up Joba?

Steven Goldman of BP places the cause of Joba's demotion squarely at the feet of the Yankees:

In naming

Phil Hughes

their fifth starter and sending

Joba Chamberlain

off to an unspecified role in the bullpen, the Yankees tacitly acknowledged that in their frantic efforts to protect Chamberlain's health by limiting his innings, they had failed to develop him properly. But considering the bizarre way in which they're treated their talented young right-hander the past two seasons, it's not a surprise.

Let me interrupt for a second here. Goldman is making a lot of assumptions with this opening statement.  The first is that the Yankees picked Hughes over Joba because Joba does not have the ability to handle the starting role.  That's possible.  It's also possible that over the last 12 months, Hughes has proven to be the better pitcher and spring training did little to change that. It also assumes that, if Joba was "developed properly," he would have blossomed into the ace pitcher everyone hoped he would be.  That essentially goes against everything people like Goldman know and preach about developing pitching prospects.  Quite simply, the adage is, TINSTAAPP: This Is No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect. Goldman is judging the Yankees on the standard that Joba was not only a can't miss prospect, but a can't miss

pitching

prospect.  That is a standard that has long been proved impossible to reach.  The fact that Goldman applies it to the Yankees shows a willingness to disregard standards for bias. Continuing:

After struggling with his command early last season, Chamberlain caught fire in the immediate aftermath of the All-Star break, allowing just two runs in three starts. The Yankees picked that moment to impose the Joba Rules 2.0, and it was no coincidence that Chamberlain was no longer the same pitcher. The mental effort he needed to succeed on the mound was hijacked by his absorption in "The Rules." Would he be yanked in the second inning if he burned too many pitches? If he was given a quick hook, would he pitch again in five days or ten?

Actually, Joba had three more starts after he "caught fire" and before the Joba Rules 2.0 kicked in.  In those three starts, he threw 16 innings, gave up 12 runs, 18 hits, 12 walks and 12 strike outs.  Not to on fire anymore. But as Goldman presents it, it was the

Yankees

that caused that decline, not Joba's decline that encouraged them to ease off of his workload. Continuing...

It says something that Chamberlain was bumped from the playoff rotation for

Chad Gaudin

, a pitcher the Yankees just released. The move liberated Chamberlain, at least to a certain extent, and he looked more like a pitcher and less like the oppressed last man on Kafka’s pitching staff. His aggregate postseason performance (6 1/3 innings, nine hits, two runs, one walk, seven strikeouts) was effective but hardly dominating. In his attenuated spring training performance, Chamberlain was neither, allowing 10 hits, seven walks, and 12 runs in 6 2/3 innings.

As people in the comments section of the article pointed out, Chad Gaudin never started a game in the playoffs.  If the Yankees kept Joba in line for the fourth starter spot in the playoffs, it may have been he and not Gaudin who only pitched one inning in the entire playoffs. It made little sense to keep Joba in the rotation when the Yankees had plans to go forward with only three starters.  The Yankees put Joba in the pen where his innings could stay down and they could try and use him in high leverage situations.  The alternative might have been... Chad Gaudin in high leverage situations.  Does that make more sense?

That last number, 6 2/3, is key to the Yankees' confession of Chamberlain confusion: It’s a tiny sample by which to judge a pitcher who is not only a three-year veteran, but has finally arrived at the Yankees’ arbitrarily determined point of physical maturity, the moment when there would be no more rules. They wouldn’t judge

CC Sabathia

by fewer than seven innings -- indeed, Sabathia has been hit hard this spring, but it’s assumed he’s working his way into shape.

This is another assumption by Goldman, that it was indeed spring performance that tipped the scales and not the regression the Yankees have seen from Joba the Starter dating back to the month before Joba's injury in 2008.  It also ignores that the pitcher the Yankees gave the fifth starter spot to, Phil Hughes, pitched well last year out of the bullpen and has overall career-wise shown better command of his plus pitches, on top of developing a changeup this spring that has proven effective.  Judging by the last twelve months of performance, Hughes has been the better pitcher.

In Chamberlain’s case, it is impossible to separate the struggles of March from those of August and September. However well Hughes pitched in the 2009 regular season, no matter how promisingly he pitched this spring, there can be no clearer admission that the Yankees no longer know what they have in Chamberlain than their willingness to demote him from the rotation based on such a small sample.

Going into the All Star break of 2009, Joba had a 4.25 ERA, averaging less than 5.1 innings per start. He had a 1.56 WHIP and a 1.86 K/BB ratio.  The ERA is decent but the WHIP and K/BB were not.  It's safe to say that Joba wasn't great the first half either and the second half was worse. Why, then, is Goldman assuming the Yankees are just judging on spring?  Because they said it was a competition?  Cashman said he had no more money before he signed Mark Teixeira last off-season.  When do we take what these guys say at face value? When it gives us fodder for criticism.

The sad truth of pitching is that it may be inherently injurious. Until the moment pitchers can wear a monitor that gives teams a real-time look at the inner workings of their arms, there is no sure way to prevent pitching injuries. Sure, there are common-sense things to avoid, like 150-pitch outings in a cold April rain. But to pretend, as the Yankees did, that they could spot the injury inflection point and somehow steer Chamberlain around it was no more than the wishful thinking of a team that hadn’t reared a young pitcher in years and had no clue how to go about it.

What the Yankees did was predict how many innings they thought Joba would throw by the end of the year.  When he reached a point where starting was going to give him too many innings going into the postseason, they pulled back. It's preposterous to claim that a team thought they knew what the injury point was.  No one is that bold or arrogant.  They were trying to predict workload and how best to manage that workload so that Joba wouldn't go over his projected innings and still would provide the Yankees with value.

Now they have a pitcher who is theoretically healthy but has diminished control and reduced velocity, and looks over his shoulder when he pitches. As BP’s injury expert Will Carroll wrote, “Joba may be remembered as the nadir of the 'save young pitchers' movement. Everything they did was to keep him healthy. Well, he is." In other words, congratulations, Yankees. You got what you wanted, but lost what you had.

And this last line is just the icing on the cake. Goldman treats Joba as if his future ability was preordained, which as we discussed earlier is a preposterous stance to take with a young pitcher.  But Goldman is confident in saying that Joba's "diminished control and reduced velocity" are all factors of the Yankees handling of him and not the typical pitfalls that happen with almost any pitching prospect.  Goldman also makes no mention of the injury Joba suffered in August of 2008 and what possible long term effects that could have had on Joba or the fact that he had shown durability issues when pitching in college. No, the rules are different for Joba and the Yankees.  When a pitching prospect fails to live up to their calling like so many have done before, it is the Yankees who have screwed him up, not the longstanding theory of TINSTAAPP. It's great for Goldman to float the theory.  It just would have been nice if he actually provided

FACTS

or

EVIDENCE,

two essential and required tenants for this type of criticism, before sending this off to his editor. Let me be clear about my perspective on this: I think Joba should be in the rotation.  I think they have brought him this far and need to give him the unhindered year they have been working toward.  However, I remain hopeful that the Yankees have every intention on keeping Joba available as the sixth starter should someone fall to injury or should Hughes fail to perform. If they fail to keep him in that role, my only assumption can be that they don't believe Joba can handle starting, period.  I don't agree with making that assessment before giving him the job full time for a season.