The Bronx View

This week, Ian and Scott talk about the last remaining spring training moves and discuss a little known man named Joba.

This is probably the last week we’re going to have any Joba discussions.  If the Yankees are tired of dealing with it then so are we.

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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.

The Bronx View podcast is a biweekly show hosted by Ian Collier and Scott Ham that discusses the Yankees and Major League Baseball.

This week, Ian and Scott talk about the pitching in spring training and give their division and individual award predictions.

NOTE: Sorry about the noise on this week’s show.  We’ve been having some tech difficulties the last couple of shows.

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I’m proud to announce that this is the one millionth post on the internet about Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes!  In honor of this occasion, we’re having ribs.

But seriously… I do some driving throughout the day.  Not a lot.  I’m not a salesman or taxi driver.  But I spend some time in my car.

Because of this, I usually wind up listening to sports talk radio. I’ve given up on the FM dial, especially in New York where the radio is flooded with pop music, classic rock and little else. For someone who likes sports and hates popular music, there is little choice.

It’s not easy, though.  It’s darn near impossible to be an objective baseball fan while gathering your news from the New York media. News in general is so slanted toward the negative while the pundits make their ratings by expressing what they believe to be the contrary opinion. This usually has the reverse effect when those that actually do gather their news from these sources repeat these contrary opinions at the water cooler the next day.

It’s no wonder why so many people on 660 WFAN in New York call up with so many crazy ideas.

I firmly believe that this rampant contrarian point of view is part of the reason why the baseball writing establishment has had such a difficult time accepting the concept of sabermetrics. It’s not that sabermetrics represents anything bad.  Even the most uninformed statistical person would have to concede that the intentions of the people creating some of these new statistics are pure and can therefore assume that they’re not insidiously hiding negative factors into WAR and Win Shares just to stick it to Murray Chase.

In fact, it’s not so much what sabermetrics does that is threatening to the baseball writing establishment, but what it encourages: objective analysis.

Some of the newer statistics can bend your mind a little bit.  I won’t deny that.  But there has also been an effort to make reading these statistics easier by basing them against the league average.  The higher you are above zero or one hundred (depending on your statistic), the better the player has performed. This makes looking at certain numbers pretty easy.

Most writers in the mainstream baseball media don’t care about such things, though.  The average Yankee fan isn’t going to call up Mike Francesa at WFAN and and talk about Derek Jeter’s steadily improving UZR over the last few seasons. It’s too much work for Joe Baseballfan and way too much work for Mike Francesa to either store that information in his brain or type fast enough to load FanGraphs and speak confidently on the numbers themselves.

More importantly, it’s difficult to be contrarian when presenting actual evidence. It’s much easier to create a false argument based on hyperbole than it is one rooted in fact.  With little actual fact to back up the argument, Joe Baseballfan will get agitated because he disagrees and has a different hyperbolic, unquantifiable reason why, say…  Robinson Cano can’t seem to hit in the clutch.  In it’s own way, it benefits the mainstream media to be lazy and vague because presenting good evidence would curb discussion that drives ratings and what few newspaper sale there are left.

Rarely has this dysfunctional form of communication ignited a story more than the ongoing saga of Joba Chamberlain and Phil Hughes.

The Yankees entered spring training saying all the right things: nobody has the fifth starter job locked up; everyone has a chance, regardless of their role last year; this is a competition and may the best man win.

That’s all fine.  Baseball is a sport, after all, and if nothing else sport is rooted in competition. It should be competition that theoretically brings out the best in an athlete’s performance.  The need to work hard and excel at one’s craft should go a long way toward improving that person’s skills and ability.

So yeah, I get why the Yankees have entered the spring with that as their mantra both in the fifth starter’s slot and in left field. The thing is, when it comes to the rotation, I have a hard time believing it.

The Yankees have spent the last two seasons nurturing Joba Chamberlain’s young arm in preparation for a hopefully injury-free career as a starting pitcher.  They did this for one reason: they believe Joba has the ability to be a good or, dare I say great, starting pitcher.

Joba’s performance to this point has been a bit confusing.  In 2008, after leaving the bullpen to join the rotation, Joba posted an impressive 2.76 ERA in an injury shortened season. In 2009 as a starter, he posted a more pedestrian and below league average 4.78 ERA.

Which is the real Joba?  One would hope he’s somewhere in between.  Considering the Joba was only 23 last season, we have every reason to believe that he will steadily improve for a couple of seasons barring any type of permanent or lingering arm damage.  That’s a reasonable expectation given what we know about how starting pitchers develop.

The Yankees are aware of this, too, which makes the current competition for the fifth starter’s spot a little strange. Surely, the Yankees can’t base the future of both Phil Hughes and Joba Chamberlain on a bunch of starts in spring training.  We do have a track record of what both pitchers have done in the majors so far which is much more indicative of their abilities than 22 innings in Tampa.  Joba’s ability to start without limitation this season compared to Hughes’ limited innings would seem to be the deciding factor, especially given the Yankees acquisition of Javier Vazquez in an effort to secure more innings out of their starters.

It would also seem that if Joba were to fail in spring training on such a level as to force his way out of the rotation, it would be questionable whether he could be trusted in the bullpen.  He only needs to be good, not great, to get the fifth starters spot.  If he can’t be trusted there, he probably can’t be trusted anywhere.

Consider Joba and Hughes’ career numbers in the majors:

(the bold columns are only there to make it easier to read)

Joba has more innings and also a better overall performance but his trend has been upward a bit.  Hughes, meanwhile, dealt with a leg injury in 2008 that severely limited his innings and went to the bullpen last season to get more major league experience.  Both men are decent pitchers for their ages which means their success in the bullpen should not be a surprise.  Both have also exhibited the same pattern, which is pitching very well out of the pen and having more difficulty in the rotation.

That’s to be expected for a young pitcher.  The Yankees are not an organization that typically allows a starting pitcher, never mind two, to develop on the major league roster.  That makes it difficult to plan a full season of work for both men in 2010.

But there will likely be opportunities for a sixth starter to make a major contribution in 2010.  In 2009, five starters outside of the main four combined for 32 starts.  In 2008, the Yankees spread 33 starts amongst 7 starters who weren’t considered part of the rotation while Joba,  Sidney Ponson and Chien-Ming Wang split 42 starts in the fifth spot.  In 2007, the also split 29 starts between eight different starters.

The moral of the story?  More likely than not, there will be opportunities for Phil Hughes to pitch in the rotation at the major league level, making this little competition with Joba somewhat unnecessary.

The remaining question: where do you put Hughes in the meantime that he can be stretched out and ready for the rotation when/if that opportunity arises?  They can keep him in the pen and try and get him longer outings so that stretching him out could be a relatively quick and painless process.  They can make him a long man, possibly as a caddy to Joba should he struggle, but the expected innings would be a gamble.  Or, they can send him to the minors and let him start there until needed.

The minors is probably a waste of his arm and the long man option is a minefield of missed opportunities.  The best thing is probably for Hughes to start in the pen, hopefully throwing 2+ inning outings as much as he can.  If the rotation opened up, he could either make a few short starts with a long reliever as a caddy or go to AAA Scranton for three starts and get himself up to five innings if the need is long term.