Joba’s ‘dangerous’ curveballs
Mike Harrington is a solid writer and I usually enjoy his copy. But I sometimes wonder if baseball isn’t his game.
Take his Sunday column in the Buffalo News revising his thinking on Yankees reliever-turned starter Joba Chamberlain. While he eventually engages in the legitimate (and ongoing) debate over where Chamberlain is more valuable to his team, Harrington leads with disbelief that as the Yankees acclimatize the right-hander to starting they would dare pull him when he reaches his pitch count. In Yankee Stadium, no less(!), whatever that means.
The guy throws 27 pitches and then you send him to the pen to throw 28 more after he’s out of the game? He gets pulled after 62 pitches and seven outs in his first start Tuesday? What is this? That kind of stuff is what you do in Class A ball. You don’t even do that at Triple-A.
I can’t believe this is going on in the major leagues, let alone in Yankee Stadium.
Maybe he’s trying to be funny, or he’s implying that it’s somehow inappropriate for a major league team to pull its starter after 2+ innings. Maybe he just means Joba should have been shipped off to the minors for a few starts before rejoining the big club, though it should be noted that the Yankees were able to get good relief work out of Joba as they stretched him out.
Whatever he means, I’ll give him a pass on that one. His most ridiculous comment comes at the end of the piece:
And you have to worry about Chamberlain’s arm too. Now, all of a sudden, he has to throw curveballs and change-ups and not just rely on fastballs and sliders. That’s pretty dangerous to do to a guy in midstream.
First of all, Joba has been throwing curveballs and changeups all along. For the year, he’s thrown around 550 pitches in his 30 innings: 68% fastballs, 25% sliders, 6% curves and 1% changeups. He’s maybe a little too dependent on his top two pitches, but they’re GOOD pitches. How often did Nolan Ryan throw his changeup? For most power pitchers, their third and fourth pitches are “show pitches” – show it to the hitter and get him thinking something other than 1 or 1A is coming. Joba’s numbers are right in line with that. And as a starter, I wouldn’t expect that to change.
More absurdly, it appears Harrington worries that snapping off a curveball is going to send Chamberlain’s elbow hurtling into the on-deck circle (In Yankee Stadium!!!). Maybe if Joba hadn’t thrown a curve in the last 5 years, but he made 15 starts last season. Surely he threw a few curve balls in those. It would also defy logic to think that Joba hadn’t worked on ALL of his pitches during spring training, all of two months ago. And that extra 28-pitch bullpen session Harrington was all worked up about? I think it’s safe to say it wasn’t 100% fastballs.
The truth of the matter is, the verdict is still very much out on Joba as a starter. Great stuff & limitless potential doesn’t always translate into major league victories (see Hughes, Phil). At least not right away. My guess is if Joba had fared better in his first start, Harrington may not have been so quick to jump off the bandwagon.
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