RAB Note: There’s no Down on the Farm for Sunday because there were no games. Two were rained out; two teams had scheduled off days.

So I got my wish on Sunday: The Yanks were rained out, thus saving us the agony of another Kei Igawa start. Almost.

The Baseball Gods, you see, are fickle. While the Yanks’ rain out meant a rejuggled rotation, the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees were also rained out, and Ian Kennedy’s start will be pushed back from Sunday to Monday. Thus, instead of being the potential starter for Friday’s game had he done well in AAA yesterday, Kennedy wouldn’t be set to start again until Saturday, and the Yanks are left searching for another starter. Curses!

Already, this is shaping up to be the topic of the week. Yankee bloggers, sick of writing about fist pumps and David Wells, have turned to everyone’s favorite game, Guess the Starting Pitcher. Our first two contestants were Peter Abraham and Cliff Corcoran. They both come to the same conclusion: Anybody but Igawa. And I don’t have a better answer.

Right now, what we do know is that Kei Igawa is not and probably never will be a legitimate Major League pitcher. Buster Olney said as much on Saturday:

Kei Igawa threw 64 pitches Friday, and Detroit swung and missed only twice and mustered 11 hits in 19 at-bats against the left-hander, a mere .579 batting average. Heard this evaluation from one Yankees’ source: Igawa doesn’t have the raw stuff to pitch in the majors.

Kei Igawa is just flat-out terrible, and that is no longer news. So the Yanks have myriad options open to them. They could have Kennedy throw a side session tomorrow and bring him up next week. They could go with a AAA starter like Dan Giese or Steven White and hope to catch lightening in a bottle for a day. They could go with last year’s sacrificial lamb Chase Wright. They could — but probably won’t after Jonathan Albaladejo’s injury — ask Ross Ohlendorf to throw a three- or four-inning start with a patchwork of bullpen pitchers behind him picking up the slack.

Right now, we just don’t know, and until the Yankees announce something, I’m sure everyone writing on the Yankees will spend the week speculating. So what do you do, RAB readers? I’m at a loss for this one, but I’d settle for just about anyone other than Kei Igawa.

MLB Trade Rumors (where you can catch me every Saturday morning from 10 ’til 2) has an interesting note this morning: David Wells wants to come back to the Yankees. What’s worse, there are indications — whatever the hell that means — that Hank Steinbrenner is interested as well. Despite the Yankees troubles with starting pitching to this point, I can only hope this is a rumor started by a rogue publication just to stir up the fan base.

But stirred we will not be! Why not? Because we know the Yankees are smarter than this. Wells threw 157.1 innings last year, all for NL West teams, and finished with a 5.43 ERA. He’s 45 years old. In other words, he’s cooked. There’s no way around it. In fact, I can give you a list of pitchers within our organization that I’d rather give a shot than David Wells (in no particular order):

Kei Igawa
Jeff Karstens
Alan Horne
Brett Smith
Steven White
Jeff Marquez
Carl Pavano
Dan McCutchen
Ross Ohlendorf
Humberto Sanchez
Chase Wright
Dan Giese
Steven Jackson
Phil Coke
Jason Jones
George Kontos
Ian Nova
Michael Dunn
Zach McAllister
Ryan Pope

If every one of these pitchers failed, yeah, then I’d give Wells a call.

Portrait of Wells from Frank Galasso.

With Ian Kennedy on the way down, all signs are point to a Kei Igawa start in Detroit next weekend. Considering that Kennedy claims he’s making progress, I’d rather just see Ian make his next start at the Big League level. For what it’s worth, Igawa is 3-3 with a 3.86 ERA in 39.2 AAA innings. He’s walked just 12 and has 40 strike outs, but he’s still getting more outs in the air than on the ground. Igawa’s never had much of a problem getting MiLB hitters out, but his stuff hasn’t translated into Big League success at all yet.

In discussing Phil Hughes’ injury this afternoon, I teased you all with a forthcoming post on Joba and the starting rotation, long a favorite RAB topic. What better time than after another 4.2-inning effort by one of the Yankee starters?

Before delving into the fun, let’s revisit tonight. Yanks score in the first and muster nothing offensively the rest of the game. Jonathan Albaladejo is worked well beyond any reasonable workload, and Chris Britton finally pitches in a game. Bad pitching, terrible offense, bad manager. The end.

So that brings to Joba Chamberlain. Currently, the Yankees are searching for answers out of the bullpen. They have Phil Hughes shelved with a fractured rib. Hopefully, he’ll return before the All Star break, but that seems to be a rather optimistic assessment. He’ll need at least a month of training and rehab after his month off for healing. Meanwhile, Ian Kennedy continues to struggle with his pitch counts.

But Joba Chamberlain’s eventually arrival in the starting rotation should happen regardless of the 2008 fates of Kennedy and Hughes. It really is just a matter of innings.

One month into the season, Chamberlain has thrown 11.1 innings in 10 appearances. The goal for him this year is to reach about 145 innings pitched or 30 more than he threw last year. That, according to a whole bunch of recent studies, should help him improve his arm strength without sending him into that danger zone of arm trouble. So how does Joba throw 133 more innings this year?

Well, let’s give him another 13 innings for May. That puts him needing 120 IP from June to September. For the purpose of this exercise, we can’t assume that the Yankees are going to make the playoffs. Outside of their lackluster play recently, Joba needs to be a position to reach 145 innings before the season ends. If the end of the year rolls around and the Yanks are in a position to play in October, they can begin to get creative with Joba’s turn in the rotation.

Now, luckily for us, the Yankees have a good benchmark for starts made in a partial season. We need to look no further than Roger Clemens to see how many innings Joba would pitch over a certain time frame. Between June 9 and Sept. 16 last year, Clemens made 17 starts and threw 98 innings in those starts, averaging 5.78 IP a start. He skipped a start in August and missed four in September. He also threw 15 Minor League innings over the course of three starts.

So now we can go back to those 120 innings Joba needs to throw over the last four months of the season. Let’s say he too needs 12 innings in the Minors covering three starts to stretch it out: one three-inning appearance, one four-inning appearance and one five-inning appearance. We’re now at 108 IP. How about three weeks of relief in June? That’s about 8 innings.

So Joba the starter would have to throw 100 pitches. If he averages around 6 innings a start — and there’s no reason to think he couldn’t — he would have to make between 16 and 17 starts. Using the Roger Clemens gamelog, it seems that Joba should land in the rotation right before the All Star break during the first week of July. If signs don’t point that way by the end of this month and the beginning of the next, then we’ll know something is up with Joba’s move to the pen. I think, however, that the Yanks will pursue this path.

Meanwhile, imagine if the Yanks get Joba into the rotation at around the same time that Phil Hughes makes his injury-free return to the Yankees. It would be like Christmas in July for us.

Despite the struggles of Phil Hughes last night, the Yankees were able to bring the tying and go-ahead runs to the plate on more than one occasion during the game’s late innings. Why? Because the bullpen was utterly lights out.

Three pitchers combined to pitch 5.1 three-hit innings. They combined for one walk and six strikes outs while doing everything they could to keep the Yankees’ dormant offense within spitting distance of the Tigers.

For the Yanks, this newfound bullpen success is a welcome surprise. Over the last five games, the Yanks’ pen has been stellar. The pen has thrown 18 innings, and the pitchers have given up two earned runs on nine hits while walking 10 and striking out 18. While the walk totals area bit high, the strike out totals are excellent.

On the season, the pen’s numbers are pretty good. Yankee relievers have an ERA of 3.72, good for seventh in the AL. They’ve given up 42 runs on 89 hits while walking 39 and striking out 92. Opponents are hitting .237/.314/.349, and the team has blown just one save this season.

But there is a problem: The Yankee bullpen has thrown an AL-leading 101.2 innings this year. They’ve thrown 0.1 innings less than the Major League leaders, and at this rate, the Yanks are going to burn out their bullpen. While they have the fresh arms in the minors and the pen promises to be something of a revolving door this season, the Yanks need more length for their starters. But we knew that already.

No, Phil Hughes is not pitching well. I had big hopes for last night, after seeing how sharp he was last time out, before the rain delay. He did not fulfill those hopes, though, and naturally it raised questions about his belonging on a major league roster. Those questions should be asked. Hughes has been frustratingly inconsistent, and further has put a taxing on our bullpen. He’s the youngest pitcher in the majors, so the simple solution would be to let him work out his issues at AAA.

The only problem is, I’m not sure that’s the remedy.

At some point, there will be no harm in trying. But right now, as in today, I’m not convinced that a demotion is in order. Some readers might thing I’m trying to spin this with, as one commenter said, Hughes-colored glasses. But it’s not quite that. Hear me out.

First, let’s look at the immediate. Hughes’s next scheduled start is Sunday against Seattle. It’s not like they’ve got a super-charged offense, so you might as well let the kid go out there and see if he can start May better than he left off April. Plus, it’s still relatively early, so we can afford a hint of patience.

Monday is a day off. So if Hughes throws another poor game on Sunday, you can skip his next start, sending him down for a spare bullpen arm or bench bat, until a fifth starter is needed again. If he pitches well, you can proceed with caution.

Now let’s get to the long-term.

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Due to the rain delay on Thursday, Phil Hughes threw just two innings and 23 pitches. The three of us speculated that the Yanks could make Hughes available out of the pen today if Kennedy should struggle. The Yankees, however, would rather not disrupt the routine of their young arm. Hughes will, as PeteAbe notes in the last line of his Yankee notebook toady, stay on his regular rest and next appear in a game on Tuesday.

When controversy strikes the Yankee clubhouse, everyone has an opinion about it. Today’s Joba Chamberlain opinion comes to us from Johnny Damon via Tyler Kepner and the Bats blog:

Speaking of Chamberlain, here’s Johnny Damon’s take on his role. It seems to be the majority opinion of the veterans in the clubhouse: “Joba as a starter, he has a chance to help us out once every five days. Him coming in and bridging the gap to Mariano, he’s got a chance to do that three or four times during those five games.

Damon added: “Our objective is to win games. Down the road, if we can find someone else like him to throw that eighth inning, then so be it, he’ll be able to start. But he’s helping us win too many games so far this year.”

The emphasis, of course, is mine.

Johnny Damon’s math, in my opinion, is off a bit. Let’s say the Yankees play three games every five days in which they absolutely need Joba Chamberlain to pitch the 8th. I would consider that to be a one- or two-run save situation in the 8th inning or a situation, like last night, where the game could get out of hand in the 7th. Joba would then be throwing at most three innings every five days.

That math translates to about 100 innings pitched in a 162-game season, and only overworked folks like Scott Proctor see that sort of bullpen use and bause. Joba the starter could be throwing at least six innings every five days for something along the lines of 180-200 innings pitched a season. It’s a no-brainer in terms of numbers.

But what I find interesting about this short piece is how Kepner notes that Damon and the other Yankee veterans all see to prefer Joba in the 8th. To me, it seems as though the idea of Joba has become something of a crutch for the Yankees. Even if he pitches just once in five days because the Yanks lose two games and are winning the other two by lopsided margins, the idea that Joba is in the bullpen does more for the Yankees’ psyche than his presence does in the games.

That, however, is no way to win championships.

While sports talk radio and a lot of Yankee fans have panicked over the start of the season, David Pinto reminds us that things could be worse. Last year, at this point, the Yanks were 8-12, and they had used nine different starters including Carl Pavano, Kei Igawa and Chase Wright. This year, the five starters have thrown in turn each time around the rotation; Kennedy threw but did not start in KC. Says Pinto, “It’s a stable rotation. I don’t think anyone should be panicking yet.”

Despite Hank Steinbrenner’s demand that Joba be inserted into the rotation, that move will not happen any time soon. Not that we didn’t know that. His innings cap will keep him in a limited role until at least mid-June, and at latest until the All-Star break. From the GM himself:

“Joba’s staying in the bullpen right now,” The Yankee GM told Newsday in a telephone conversation this morning. “That’s where we’re at. [Putting him in the rotation is] not something that’s going to happen here early on, and [Hank] knows that. We’ve talked about it. I don’t know what set him off.”

I’m fairly certain that the recent performances from Hughes and IPK are what set him off. I can’t blame him one bit. During each of their last outings, I found myself tossing things across the room (pillows, thankfully), and screaming “throw strikes!!!!,” much to the chagrin of my neighbors. It’s frustrating. But it can certainly turn around.

I have faith that the kids will grow into their roles and perform well this season. It’s not like Hughes and IPK are guys with suspect control, and who are now being exploited in the majors. They’re two guys with good control (superb in Kennedy’s case) who just aren’t getting it done. They’re going to have to get back to the basics for a bit. And unfortunately, that could mean a few games where they get bombed. But I’d far rather see that than to see them racking up enormous pitch counts early in games.

Joba to the rotation is going to happen. All signs point to it. We just have to be patient. I know that’s a tall order on the Bronx, but it’s what’s required at this point. I’m very surprised more people didn’t learn that after last season.