[Pitching stats for Joba can be found at BR and at Fangraphs. BR: 2007, 2008, 2009.
Fangraphs: 2007, 2008, 2009.

Joba Chamberlain went on the DL in August 2008 with his shoulder injury.

In 2007, a young pitcher who had fallen lower in the draft because of weight and injury concerns, captivated a fan base as he rose from A ball to the Majors in one season, throwing heat while working as a set-up man in a bullpen that, well, had issues. Relievers not named Mariano included Brian Bruney, Jose Veras, Edwar Ramirez, Kyle Farnsworth…and they were all managed by Joe Torre–so yeah, issues.

Joba so electrified the fan base–and his personal story, with his paralyzed single father, added some color to the legend–that expectations came about which we, as discerning fans, should have realized as unreachable, but did not.

We expected, then, as in 2008 Joba was to make the switch from reliever to starter, that he’d take to the new role as a fish to water.

In fact, I bought tickets to the game in which he made his first start–throwing over 20 pitches in the first inning and not making it past the third. The Yankees lost that game but it wasn’t really Joba’s fault, and that’s more or less how it played out.

Joba threw too many pitches for someone on a strict pitch/innings count, and hurt the team not so much because the other team hit him, but because he left the game early and caused the Yankees to burn through their relievers. Bullpens, as we know, are finicky–they can be rock solid one month, and then a couple bad starts later, they can become utterly burnt out.

The issue, as we all know, was further compounded when Joba sustained a shoulder injury in August 2008, and there is some question (which I will not attempt to answer, because I don’t own a radar gun) as to whether or not Joba’s been able to completely recover.

In 2009, there was a lot of the same–Joba throwing too many pitches–until just after the All Star break, when he reeled off a week’s worth of excellent starts, pitching as though all the hype had been deserved.

His reward? The Yankees, in a fit of helicopter parenting, messed with his routine, and it kind of all fell apart there.

There are so many variables at work here, it’s nigh on impossible to pick just one as the cause of Joba’s problems. I would argue, rather, that the combination of them–expectations set too high, shoulder injury, mismanagement and some sort of primal phobia of the strike zone–have conspired to descend upon one young man. The starter/reliever debate is simple to address if you think of it like this: while the previous four issues are toil and trouble, Joba is probably best as a reliever; if these issues get tackled, Joba will be quite fine as a starter.

It is my belief that in this case, whether Joba is better off as a starter or a reliever is inextricably linked to the problems thus identified.

It’s also impossible to figure out which one of the problems should be the easiest to fix. Forget trying to reset our expectations–even if one of us was to say “well, maybe he won’t be uber awesome”, another one of us would probably say “but he’s only 24! You can’t lose your faith! Pink hat!”

Shoulder injuries can be fixed in theory, but they’re nasty, and come with no guarantee that they won’t be re-injured. There’s a reason they’re considered much more serious to pitchers than elbow injuries.

Mismanagement is only easy to fix in hindsight. The Yankees thought that they were doing the right thing with Joba, in trying to find a way to limit his innings, because the new conventional wisdom states that you have to limit the innings of a young pitcher to avoid injury.

The inability to throw strikes? One first has to figure out if the problem is mechanical or psychological. I’d wager that the nibbling is in a large part psychological, but I’m no coach or doctor, so take my word with a grain of salt.

The Yankees, Joba, and yes, ourselves (since issue #1 is of our own doing), don’t have to address just one of these issues, we have to address all four. When we do, we just might get that old Joba back–the one we’ve been so high on in the first place.