Implicit advice to Posada regarding Joba
ByWhile Jorge Posada‘s compatibility with A.J. Burnett came into question during the 2009 season, that’s not the only pitcher-catcher combo on which we commented. Jorge also had a hard time working with Joba Chamberlain, though many of us pinned that on the younger of the pair. That was understandable. Joba spent too much time shaking off Jorge’s calls, and not enough time throwing strikes.
In his blog entry today, Buster Olney points us to the blog of former catcher Brent Mayne, who has been writing about catching. It’s promotion for his book on the subject, but he does offer up useful tips for catchers. Today has to do with the basics of setting up around the plate. His advice for catchers:
This is how you can help. Work fast. Put the signs down quickly and intuitively. Get the pitcher in a good tempo and remember the less time he has to think, the better. DO NOT set up too far on the corners! Unless your pitcher’s name is Greg Maddux or Cliff Lee, setting up away from the plate is an excellent recipe for a walk-a-thon. Only split the corners of the plate with your crouch when you are way ahead in the count. Make the pitcher throw good low strikes yielding weak ground balls. Set up around the plate and make the offense put the ball in play right now.
Easier said than done, of course, and your pitcher can always mess up the rhythm by shaking off too many signs. Still, it’s advice I like. Whether it actually works I’m not sure. But I’d feel a lot better about Joba if Posada handled him like this.
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Makes sense…I’m surprised Posada doesn’t know any of this already…Maybe the Yankees can sign Bret Mayne as a spring training instructor. THAT would make sense.
I would presume that Posada is quite aware of all these points. Why it doesn’t look that way at times is another story.
Exactly and it seems a little pretentious to think otherwise.
Im not 100% sure he agrees. He is a very intense fiery player and that’s part of his charm. It might just be adversely effecting his play calling. Just because a characteristic attributes to your success as a performer means it is a useful tool as an administrator (or game caller). Maybe he is trying to challenge Yankee hurlers, to a fault.
Maybe this is what works for Pettite and a lot of the hurlers he has had success with. Think Clemens, Wells, Mariano, Mussina, Pettite. These guys are older and from a different generation. They might need to be challenged differently than these younger hurlers. Or have different attriubtes that make them succeed.
Regardless the team has to be on top of the differences wither its ballpark related, blocking related, culturally related/age related, or pitchers comfort. They have to be on top of that shit.
can’t just be rested on his shoulders. The yankees coaching staff has to
“”Leave him in the bullpen,” Posada replied flatly, before being asked to expand on his answer. “If you start him and he pitches 200 innings, he won’t be able to (last).
“You’re going to lose him. He’s going to get hurt … I don’t see him as a starter. I’d leave him in the bullpen.” ”
http://www.nydailynews.com/spo.....llpen.html
There’s a difference between challenging young pitchers to be better, and publically stating that they have no future as a starter.
Also- “I said in the spring, seeing him as a reliever, I think his body is made to be a reliever,” Posada said. “This year tells you a sign, a little sign. A little tendinitis tells you a lot. … I don’t see it.”
We all like Posada, but that’s bush league. Shut your mouth and keep it in the clubhouse. Even if you think that, you don’t spout off to the media. How does that help anyone? If anything, he said it to deflect some of the criticism for him being a poor game-caller, particularly the stuff with AJ.
I don’t like to fall for the narrative motifs that so conveniently fit our preconceived notions, but having a catcher so explicitly state that he thinks you’re a failure in a specific role cannot help the psyche.
What do you mean how does it hep anyone? He’s wrong, but clearly he believes that putting him in the bullpen is the best thing for the team and he’s making that known.
*help*
But he shouldn’t be making that known. His job is to catch; undermining the possible progress of truly talented young pitcher, and the direction of the organization are foolish.
I didn’t think Debbie in Accounting should be in her present role; our boss thought differently. Just because I work with Debbie and feel that I have a valid opinion does not mean I should say to a journal, “Debbie’s not suited for this role. If anything, she should go back to Division X. She’s not cut out for it.” If you have a problem, let it be known privately or shut your mouth.
Does Posada telling the media Joba can’t survive as a starter help Joba? It may possibly motivate him. I doubt it, but the argument can be made. It sure doesn’t help the Front Office, who have clearly stated that he is a starting pitcher. I’m sure they already have enough crap about bullpen/starting roles with Joba to deal with. They don’t need the potential Hall of Fame catcher at odds with the decision publicly. The only person I can see this helping is Posada, because people will believe the problem is more with Joba’s intrinsic sensibilities, and not Posada being a poor game-caller. If anything, it’s totally selfish.
If somebody asks Debbie, she shouldn’t lie.
Jorge’s wrong. This is established. Obviously he doesn’t think he’s wrong.
Clearly Jorge doesn’t think he’s impeding Joba’s progress. On the contrary, he considers himself (rightfully so, BTW) a leader and is saying, after he was prompted, what he thinks are in the best interests of the team.
It’s not Debbie being asked. In the comparison, Debbie would be Joba; I would be JoPo.
If the media asks what I think about Debbie in her current role, I shouldn’t say what I feel. This isn’t how the real world, particularly in business, works. You don’t just say what you want, whenever you want to whoever you want. If my boss asks me privately, fine, that’s one thing, but the media is a whole other.
Ultimately, I’m not sure you can even spin it that Jorge expressing his dissenting opinion is (even in his mind) in the best interest of the team. It’s in his best interest.
“If anything, he said it to deflect some of the criticism for him being a poor game-caller, particularly the stuff with AJ.”
Well those comments were made in 2008 when he was out after surgery taping Centerstage. But he also said stuff this offseason about wanting one of Joba or Hughes in the pen
The catchers opinion of the 2nd year players potential is just that, an opinion. If the young man takes something like that to heart and it stays with him for more than 5 minutes, then I don’t think that pitcher gets out of single A ball. Joba Chaimberlain is not some delicate flower who can’t deal with adversity. He is a stuborn, (and that’s not necesarily a bad thing) young man who thinks he knows better than the veteran catcher who he’s heard being MF’d in the clubhouse by veteran pitchers. And he thinks because he hears them say the things they say, it must be true for him too.
Girrardi needs to step in and tell the young man that what Jorge puts down is what I want anyway, so just
pitch.
Posada’s not the greatest behind the plate, but as I’ve said before; all those pitchers who don’t like the way Jorgie calls a game just love it when he’s hitting those 3 run bombs.
How about a pre-game or between inning strategy that does not ALLOW Joba to shake Jorge off? After 15 years of calling games I would trust Jorge and that would help Joba’s rhythm and relaxation and diminish the “head case” factor… And if he gets hit hard….
“After 15 years of calling games”
What does that have to do with anything it is Joba after all.
LOL
In my opinion, this is half the deal with Joba – he hasn’t refined his pitches on the corners enough to throw them for strikes consistently, yet he keeps trying to in games. IMO, he should be working on those in bullpens, but when it comes to games, focus on putting it in the zone, and hopefully the muscle memory from the BP sessions will bring it to one side of the plate naturally. The other part of it is/was, I think, that he was overly concerned with efficiency and conserving himself. Personally, I’d rather see him dominate for four innings but use up 100 pitches in the process than give up 5 runs in 5 or 6 because he was pacing himself. I know that sounds like media drivel, but it really did seem like he was constantly starting off at 90-91 with a lack of command within the zone (as a former pitcher, I definitely noticed that your command worsens the further you get from 95% in either direction – I think 90-91 is roughly 90-91% for Joba, explaining his lack of command with his B-level fastball), then sometimes he’d crank it up and be at 94-95 or higher in the 4th/5th/6th innings.
I’d think it was a problem with his warmup routine, but wouldn’t explain why he was able to gun it right away out of the pen. I think it’s a mentality thing, but not an “amped up” thing – more of a “my coaches said don’t burn yourself out in the first few innings so i’m not going to throw hard until later in the game” thing. My speculative anecdotal evidence would be the boston game in early may when he gave up 4 runs in the first inning, then struck out 12 guys in the next 5 frames. In the 1st, his FB was sitting 89-91, no movement, pretty much either down the middle or out of the zone, and his slider didn’t have much bite at all. After giving up the HR to JBay, though, he seemed to say “fuck this, I’m just going to strike everybody out”, and proceeded to utterly dominate the sox for the rest of his start, with a good slider (and change, which i think was the key to his being so filthy that night) and a FB in the 94-95 range, moving it up and down in the zone.
Again, I know this is speculation, and sounds a lot like the “he’s thinking too much” narrative that B-Jobbers love to throw out there, but I really do think there’s some worth to that notion. Not so much that he’s thinking too much, as much as he’s trying to immediately apply into action everything he knows and/or has learned about pitching, which of course is impossible. The body is a lot stupider than the brain. You could study musical theory and learn pretty much everything there is to know in a matter of months, weeks, or even days, depending on how obsessed you were, but that wouldn’t make you a world-class musician. The same thing goes with pitching. You work on turning what you know how to do into what you can actually do in the minors, in the offseason, in the bullpen, but when you’re out there pitching, the only way you can succeed is by doing only what you are actually able to do, not what you want to be able to do. Right now, to his true ability, Joba is going to be mostly a 5-6 inning pitcher. There will be games where he gets lucky and is more efficient, and games where he magically has all his stuff working so well that he plows through 7-8 innings, but for the most part, he’s not there yet. And that’s ok, because it always takes a while to get there. But holding back, as he appeared to do frequently in the early innings of games (this is before his mid-august implosion – after that he just sucked, holding back or not, but that’s a whole other subject), is not the way to get there. It only worsens his already average command, and that, coupled with the inherent worsening of “held back” stuff, leads to a lot of hard-hit balls.
So yes, Posada should be in on it too, calling a quick game and setting up well within the zone. But as much as it pains me to sound like Harold Reynolds, Joba needs to just go out there and pitch.
I enjoyed your post Pete. It seems that those who feel Joba is a bullpen-er would say that he can dominate for 2 innings now just “letting it fly” but being a more “thoughtful” starter that has to go through a lineup 3-4x and make adjustments is something he is not up to doing yet. Hopefully, this year he can get through a lineup 3x consistently. Do folks think he can be an effective starter with 2 pitches-assuming control/location are there- or are 3 needed?
IMO he needs three. two really good and a third to keep batters guessing. And even a fourth would be awesome. i know crazy.
well, pitchers have succeeded with just one (wang comes to mind), but IMO, Joba needs to use all four. His curve I don’t see becoming a particularly effective pitch simply because his slider is so devastating, and batters are sometimes so geared up for it, that it can sometimes just be a slower, easier to hit version of it. It would be a good pitch to drop in when a hitter is looking fastball, especially when he wants to work up in the zone with the FB. His changeup, though, while inconsistent, could prove to be an extremely effective third pitch, since it is a completely different look. If that becomes even a borderline MLB average pitch in terms of velocity differential, arm speed, and movement, then it will make him that much more effective, especially against lefties, since he’ll likely have 3 out pitches to use against them (slider down and in, FB up/up and away/down and away, and changeup away. My guess is by the end of this year, they’re all close to their full potential in terms of nastiness, but it’ll be another year or two before he brings out their full effectiveness, because there is a difference between having a nasty slider and being able to bury that slider perfectly every time, and there is a difference between a good changeup and and being able to sink it down and away from a lefty every time, and there is a difference between an electric fastball, and an electric fastball right on the corner.
This is why you often see guys with electric stuff come up and do well but not become K-machines until a couple years later (Felix Hernandez, for example). You can have all of your pitches down, but it takes having the specific optimal locations for those pitches for them to become out-pitches. Guys with stuff as good as Jobas can succeed to a degree simply by honing their “in-pitches” – that is, hard fastball in the zone away from the middle, nasty slider, solid curve, solid changeup, because the diversity and nastiness of their repertoire will keep hitters off balance and generally keep them from hitting the ball hard. Once the control is down (that is, they stop walking guys), they become effective starters. But its not until they gain command of both their in-the-zone, keep-hitters-guessing pitches and their strikeout pitches that they realize their full potential.
Not to be picky, but how is this advice ‘implicit’?
implicit: capable of being understood from something else though unexpressed (Mirriam-Webster Online Dictionary)
The advice is very concrete. It might not be given directly to Posada, but that doesn’t make the advice implicit.
I do wonder if Posada should just sit slightly to one side to begin the season then over the course of the season slightly move farther to the corners once Joba is comfortable hitting the spots.
It boils down to Posada’s limited IQ…if brains were dynamite Posada couldn’t blow his nose…but he can hit.
How the hell did the Yankees ever win anything with Posada running the show. It sounds like he plain stinks at catching a baseball game.
Posada is a great catcher, and he provides a lot of leadership behind the plate. But we are putting too much of this on Posada and not enough for the starters. Think about Andy Pettitte and his comments about making up pitches in-game when he doesn’t have his best stuff. Joba has the tools to be a very good starting pitcher, but it takes more than tools to be a mechanic.
Joba does one of two things every time out.
1. He throws strikes. He throws that first pitch fastball for as strike, and gets ahead. Then he throws another strike with usually a slider or fastball. Then he goes to one of the slider, curveball, fastball trio and throws something just outside of the zone for ball one or a strikeout.
He doesn’t get into very high pitch counts usually, though he does go through streaks sometimes where he can’t get those first pitch strikes and doesn’t adjust. Now he is behind in the count, so he throws something over the heart of the plate and it gets hit. Hard.
2. He starts the game with those streaks. Lots of base runners early, lots of hits early. He leaves the game in the third or fourth inning. He is too thick headed to adjust to the situation and he looks like a crappy starting pitcher. Fueling the Joba-to-the-bullpen debate.
Joba Chamberlain’s number one problem is his inability to adjust. And you can hear it in his post-game comments where he takes about “making some good pitches” instead of saying what you consistently hear from Sabathia and Pettitte about “not adjusting” and “not making pitches”.
Joba is too busy saying and thinking about what he did right. But what you do right is rarely what makes or breaks your performance. It’s about limiting your mistakes. Joba hasn’t learned to adjust during the game. It takes more than talent, it takes what guys like Moose had, baseball smarts.
The best thing that Joba could do is watch CC Sabathia, whom works great with Posada. Sabathia is what Joba could be. Sabathia is a hard throwing starter with a great secondary pitch, and some plus to average pitches to throw here and there. Joba is so focused on being flashy (a bullpen thing), he doesn’t have the focus to get outs and conserve his pitches and limit his pitch count.
Joba is the problem. Not Posada. And it’s not his talent, it’s his game-plan.
“Posada is a great catcher”
Posada is a great hitting catcher yes. Posada is not a great defensive catcher- everyone agrees on that.
He is a great overall catcher. Obviously, he is a much better hitter than he is a defender, but he isn’t too shabby behind the plate either. But I was mostly talking about his game calling abilities, mainly his instincts and ability to get the best out of pitchers when they don’t have their best stuff.
How many World Series rings does Brent Mayne (who?) have? Posada has five. If he wants to take advice from Yogi then ok.
So in order for a player to have credibility his TEAM needs to be successful?