Joba Chamberlain has had an eventful week, as he was hit on the knee by a line drive in the first inning of one start and only lasted 4 innings in the next one. While these two aborted starts were not fun to watch or live in the same city as Mike Francesa after, they did come with one interesting benefit. According to ESPN, Joba is now on pace to throw 152 innings this season, which is about where most are speculating his innings cap to be set. Of course, the Yankees want Joba to go deeper into games and compile more innings per start, and hopefully he does. However, this does mean that the issue may be much less complicated than we expected before the season.
Before anyone starts with the Joba to the bullpen garbage (I turned on Francesa today for the first time since coming back from the year in Boston, and he stated unequivocally that Joba would never be an electric starter), Joba is currently the second best starter on the Yankees (2nd in ERA, 3rd in K’s). For a first year starter in the difficult AL East, an ERA under 4 and a K/9 of 9.1 is excellent. He needs to cut down on the walks a bit and be a little more aggressive in the zone, and he should finish with plenty of wins and an ERA near 3.50. Why anybody would want to remove him from the rotation at this point is beyond me.
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I’m not entirely sure he knows (yet) how to make his pitches and trust them while throwing only low 90s. I think he knows that as a starter he can’t throw it as hard as he can all the time, like he was able to do out of the pen.
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Moshe Mandel Reply:
May 27th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Agree. The only thing is, he had no such trouble throwing hard deep into games in the minors. I wonder how much it has to do with last season’s injury.
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Francesa really needs a partner.
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His velocity was better than low 90s until he got nailed with a line drive on the knee. I doubt he was really healthy for yesterday’s start.
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I worry about the guy’s health overall, actually. Nothing you can do about line drives off your knee, but the arm injury just concerns me. You hope it’s not one of those things where he can’t handle the workload.
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