Yesterday in the nightly links, Mike linked to this piece by Andrew Marchand. The article’s first line, a variation of a sentence I’ve definitely seen before, feels completely true, regardless of how cliche it seems:
Justin Louis Chamberlain is only 26 years old, but it feel as if he has scrunched a whole career into five seasons.
It feels like forever ago that my friend Mike Rogers told me to look out for Joba because he was tearing up the Hawaiian Winter League. It feels like forever ago that I tracked his progress throughout the minors in 2007. It feels like forever ago that he was called up and dominated in the fall of that year. It feels like forever ago that he popped his shoulder in Texas and was never quite the same again, despite flashes of brilliance. The crux of Marchand’s article is that Joba’s Yankee future is most definitely up in the air because of the team’s aversion to letting him start and a crowded bullpen. Marchand is not wrong and the only thing I can bring myself to feel about that is sadness.
For his brief Major League career, it seems as if Joba Chamberlain has been merely a passenger when he should’ve been the driver. Despite his dominance as a starter in the minors in 2007, he was brought up to relieve in the Majors because the team desperately needed a reliever at the time. For 2008 and 2009, he was jerked around between the bullpen and the rotation and was injured. There were times when he didn’t pitch well, but isn’t that normal from a guy who’s yet to turn 27? If there is one word that could define Joba’s career, it’s “inconsistency.”
His pitching inconsistent at times, but I find that excusable. What is inexcusable is the failure by the Yankee organization to cash in on Joba’s talent and potential. A while back, I wrote a post that essentially said the manager’s job is to put his players in a position to succeed; this principle can be expanded to an organizational level. The organization needs to put its players in the best possible position to succeed, and the Yankees did not do that with Joba Chamberlain. He is young enough that he can still make something great of his career, even if it’s not with the Yankees. But when I’m old and gray, spouting off to my kids and grandkids and one of them brings up Joba (they will; trust me), I won’t be able to do anything but shrug and frown because what could’ve have been never was.
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6 Responses to The Failure Chain
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TIQ IQ
Awful post. Awful. Pretty much what I’ve come to expect from you. Were you shooting whiskey again when you wrote this? Ask yourself how many times teams have failed to cash in on someone’s potential. I’m not defending how the Yankees handled Joba, but there are absolutely no guarantees that Joba would have succeeded as a major leaguer, much less a starter. What indication do you have that Joba isn’t just another bust? Are you conveniently forgetting that the talent was always there but the health never has? We all hope that Joba wasn’t just a flash in the pan and still makes something of himself for the Yanks, but stop lamenting a HOF career as a starter that hasn’t come to fruition.
You’re right that there’s no guarantee that Joba would have turned into something great.
But I think the Yankees completely eliminating any chance that that might happen with horrid mismanagement is absolutely a valid point that frankly, hasn’t been discussed enough.
Just because he *may not* have been great anyway doesn’t justify the bizarre way the Yankees handled him.
By the way, this is another thing I blame on Kyle Farnsworth.
Although he did give us those amazing T-shirts that read “Anybody but Farnsworth!”
Yeah, Joba’s a sad story. In my opinion he was victimized by expediency, bullpen fetishism and a bungling, indecisive approach toward his development by field management and the front office who seemed to be spooked as much by ill-informed criticism (or fear of same) by media idiots as by legitimate concerns about managing workloads for young pitchers.
I thought Joba did well as a starter until they started jerking him around with those silly “Joba rules” and indecisiveness about whether to develop him as a starter or reliever. A starting pitcher will always be more valuable than a reliever, even an “8th inning guy”, which has been exaggerated into some kind of mythological figure by the talking heads. Outside of Mariano Rivera and few other exceptions relief pitchers are highly fungible and you can usually find guys for those jobs.
I can understand why Joba was used the way he was in 2007 but if a guy has starter potential he should have to prove that he can’t do the job before he’s pre-emptively assigned to the pen. But what happened to Joba was even worse than wasting his potential in a less valuable role. The Yankees’ mismanagement of Joba’s development may well have contributed to his injury problems.
As a Yankee fan I would love to see Joba stay with the team and contribute in whatever role he’s able to following his rehab. But for Joba’s own sake I hope he gets traded to an organization that will do better by him than the Yankees did.
Those silly Joba rules were to save him from Joe T. Joe had already wasted one RP…remember Scott Proctor. Cashman traded him away to get him away from Joe T. and then let Joe T. walk!
There is little doubt Joba has been ill used by the Yankees, the same can be said of CMW.
I and many others ask; why has the Yankees not let him go back to being a starter? This is the time to try him one more time as a starter. When he can toe the rubber again, why not let him go to AAA and be a starter the rest of the season. His arm will get stronger and they don’t really need him in the BP this year (yet). He will have all year to get stronger and also show if he can be a real starter or not. Maybe someone will teach him where to start his slider…on the inside of the plate against righties. As it is now, it breaks off the outside of the plate, almost in the left handed batters box…the batters see slider and don’t swing anymore.
This guy has four workable pitches, Mo had only one but, he was given every chance to be a starter. Why are we saying no with concern to Joba? Has it anything to do with his shoulder?