Or maybe not.

He shouldn’t be pitching to a 1.85 ERA with tons of Ks and few BBs, but he should be pitching with better stats than he is right now, but not by that much.

As for whether or not he will be able to start next year could very well depend on if he goes down to AAA to stretch out and get fixed. If he gets close to the same innings he got last year he could start next year.

Didn’t Cliff Lee have a very similar story?

As for Joba, I don’t think he should go all the way down to A ball, but I do think he could really benefit from going down to AAA for a short while. He could get ironed out/worked on without interfering with the big league club, and also rebuild some of his confidence in getting hitters out, which to me seems to be the problem, he always wants to nibble the corners instead of trusting his catcher and his stuff.

/$0.02

You’re a good egg, Pete m’boy.

If we agree upon this reasoning, then two simplistic arguments could reasonably follow: either Joba isn’t done developing and needs to go to the minors to continue developing, or Joba can only continue his development from here on out at the major league level because the competition in the minors is not good enough (presumably) for him, and he’d plow through it (hopefully).

As is so often true with simplistic arguments, however, both sides are incorrect. Joba is at a point where he can develop at the major league level. He is not in way over his head, he can get major league hitters out to some degree. If he continues to pitch, he will continue to develop.

On the other hand, I don’t believe that the lower level of competition in the minor leagues would prevent him from developing there either. While he’d undoubtedly see better results, he’d be able to pitch (presumably) as a starter, throw all his pitches, gain stamina and arm strength, and throw more pitches (i.e. more reps) per outing. Once again, if he continues to pitch, he will continue to develop.

This brings us to a two-fold question: a) which would be the more efficient path for Joba, and b) which would be the more efficient path for the Yankees?

So again we’d need to return to the two present options. Firstly, pitching at the MLB level out of the bullpen. Going into the season, and still now (albeit much less so) considering his peripherals, it’s easy to see where the MLB club could benefit from Joba being in the pen. A quality reliever holds value to a club, a starter in Scranton only holds value if somebody gets injured (ahem). There are also, though, benefits for Joba.

I probably sound like a broken record, having commented about this here about a million times and once in a very long argument on M&A, but pitching out of the bullpen can, in my opinion, speed up part of a pitcher’s development process greatly. Throwing out of the bullpen releases a pitcher from the constraints of pitch counts and forces him to execute every single pitch to its maximum effectiveness. While the pitcher likely won’t always succeed in this (as Joba hasn’t this year), it stands to reason that trying to throw 12=15 fastballs to the same two or three spots every other night would improve one’s ability to throw fastballs to those spots (and the same logic would apply to his slider, perhaps even more so; in the pen he can throw every slider to the same exact spot and be successful because it is offset by a quality FB, and doing this would make him much better at throwing it to that spot (presumably its optimal location) and getting the right break on it). In other words, throwing out of the bullpen could theoretically lead to improved command on a pitcher’s primary pitches, which is extremely important for a pitcher, for obvious reasons.

While I don’t have any empirical evidence to support this theory, I do have two examples of anecdotal evidence. The first is Joba himself, back in ’08. After rising through the first two levels of the minors and basically jumping straight into the ML bullpen in ’07, Joba started the ’08 season as the setup man. When his time came as a starter, he pitched to the tune of a sparkly 2.65 ERA despite an impressive but unspectacular WHIP. The difference was that Joba was escaping jams like a maniac in 2008, with a 79% strand rate. It seemed like every start he’d be in at least one bases loaded no outs or one out jam and get out of it with no damage done (other than to his pitch count).

The reason? Strikeouts. He’d typically start innings by throwing a whole bunch of fastball strikes (or, somewhat ironically, walking guys) without particularly good location, and then when he found himself in a jam he’d “buckle down” and strike out two, sometimes three guys in a row, spotting fastballs on the black and throwing sliders in the dirt that hitters knew were coming and still swung at.

I remember being surprised by this at the time. He was not known really as a control guy in the minors, yet seemed to have impeccable command when he needed it most. Thus, my hypothesis – that reps in the bullpen lead to better execution of key pitches – was born.

It continued (my other anecdotal example, this time much shorter) to grow last year, as we saw Hughes gain command and (apparently) confidence with his fastball out of the bullpen.

That being said, however, there are other aspects of pitcher development unaddressed by bullpen stints, which can be addressed by starting in Scranton. The two most obvious are stamina and repertoire. As a starter in the minors, Joba could pitch up to his innings limits and then be shut down, which, I think most would agree, is the most effective employment of innings limits where their purpose is concerned.

He could also focus on specific pitches during starts without consequence. If he were to get lit up because he was throwing half changeups and half fastballs, there wouldn’t be mass hysteria about it. And while his out-pitch development would be less rapid than out of the bullpen, his command on pitches to contact – also an important skill for starters – would be much better developed.

This is why I think he should go to the minors; he lacks command of any of his pitches within the zone, his curveball is, when thrown, all over the place, and I can’t remember him throwing a changeup this year. Going back to the minors would enable him to work on each of those pitches, which would be good because each one needs work. People don’t seem to realize this. Not one of his pitches is where it was before the injury. I get that throwing out of the pen could improve his development of two of those pitches (and only to certain parts of the zone), but ALL of them need a lot of work, so ALL of them should get a lot of work.

At some point all pitchers must start pitching at the big league level if they possess the ability to get big league hitters out. While it cannot be facilitated as easily nor as efficiently as it can at the minor league level (in my opinion), development does still occur in the bigs. But do we (or, rather, the Yankees) really believe Joba is at that point? If you ask me, there’s simply too much more for him to gain from the minors to allow him to continue in the majors. I realize that people always say that he has nothing more to gain from facing minor league hitters, but hitters aren’t the only factor to consider. Obviously there’d be little to glean from his stats at the minor league level, but as a pitcher, there’s quite a bit more for him to gain, if you ask me.

All of this being said, however, I fully understand the Yankees’ decision to put him in the bullpen and keep him there. They believed (and were probably right to believe) that Joba could contribute a fair amount of value to the big league club pitching out of the bullpen, and they probably believed that it would help him retrieve his old strikeout weapons. But my problem with this is the fact that Joba can’t be demoted after August 7th. And while he wouldn’t regain that strikeout stuff as quickly pitching in the minors, he basically can’t regain his curve or changeup at all while pitching out of the bullpen, unless it is in something of a mopup role. What’s more, it’s a wasted year in terms of stretching his innings limit. If Joba starts in 2011, he’ll probably have to stop some time around September.

I still consider Joba Chamberlain to be a starter. But now, if the Yankees are to pursue that option, they’ll have to do it at the major league level. And because of the way they have (in my opinion) mishandled his development, he will likely suck for a while, which will probably cause uproar in the media and probably in parts of the front office, which could, in turn, cause further developmental damage.

Oh, 2007 bullpen ineptitude. How royally you’ve fucked us.

Joba was lights-out, decimating the minors in his first professional season in ’07. He was being developed as a starter, and he knew it. He had a ton of confidence from his meteoric rise through the system.

All of his mechanics & mentality were geared around this, and *I assume* he used the exact same pitching ‘formula’ to put up those stellar numbers out of the pen. How much of this was natural, and how much was a regimented routine of development bequeathed from the Yankees is very unclear.

*Aside…he also developed in college, whereas someone like Hughes went from raw HS through the player development ringer, for an appropriate period of years*

Now the plan for him to be a starter was called into question, and he began ’08 in the pen. He performed quite well in both roles in ’08, and then got injured.

We know that players have a certain amount of difficulty coming back from injury. That is, the natural ‘stuff’ that they’d relied on up to that point can no longer be counted on to deliver the results to which said pitcher has grown accustomed.

It makes sense to infer, at this point, that as a pitcher makes his way back from injury, he has more to think about. As he cannot just throw the way he used to, because he’s at risk of re-injuring himself, he must now rely on his coaches to guide him through the process. He has to learn his mechanics, if not totally anew, then at least from a different perspective. He needs to have the foundation that can only come from proper development in a metered regimen, one that is not built on haste.

Joba did not get this. Period. Therefore, the acumen for overcoming adversity is just not there. It is unfair, both to Joba and the team as a whole, to build this at the major league level, where player performance is tied to meaningful team performance.

Honestly, I feel like they came close last year. They gave him a full year of starts, where he performed well up until he was in uncharted innings territory. I *& many of you* expected him to struggle, and I expected the team to guide him through it, teaching him some of the things he should have already learned in the minors.

Instead, they shipped him back into a role in which he excelled before he went through all this adversity. They expected him to make like the previous years had never happened, and just rediscover his bullpen excellence without rediscovering his mechanical soundness & confidence.

To think that was possible…does not sound like a very strong theory to me.

I’m not saying that Joba shouldn’t get any blame, but it’s completely possible that the Yankees have harmed his developement by moving him back and forth from the starter’s role to the bullpen. Is it guaranteed that Joba would be a good/great starter right now if the Yankees stuck with him as a reliever or starter? No, not at all. He could still be terrible, but because of the unorthodox handling of Joba, people have reason to believe that the Yankees have screwed with Joba too much that it’s affected his overall developement as a pitcher.

We aren’t just talking about just 2008. It’s 2008, 2009, and 2010.

Once again I’m not saying I think he would be a great pitcher right now, but you can’t blame people for thinking that the Yankees have messed with Joba’s developement to the point where it’s stunted his developement.