Brian Burkhart chimed in yesterday with a fantastic post about the difficulties that a team like the Yankees faces when trying to develop young pitching:

Now, let me first state that this is a great problem to have. But the reality is, because the Yankees are expected to compete for the World Series every single year, it is difficult for them to give young starters the experience they need. In a perfect world, at least for Joba and Hughes, both pitchers would be allowed to make however many starts they needed to reach their innings cap. The Yankees can’t just run both pitchers out there though; they tried that in 2008 with Ian Kennedy and Hughes, to disastrous results. So instead, in comes Javier Vazquez……

The big market teams like the Yankees, Red Sox, and Mets have been accused in the past of using other teams like a farm system, but sometimes when it comes to starters, this is simply the most effective method. Look at how hard it is to juggle the development of 2 young starters.

Brian is right on the money here, as developing pitchers in a winning environment is difficult in terms of both perception and execution. Fans and media expect clubs like the Yankees and Red Sox to do what is best for the club at the present moment, and frequently suggest moves that might improve the team in the short -term but are not in the long-term best interests of the club. Teams shut down pitchers due to workload concerns all the time, but it gains negative attention when the club doing it is in the midst of a pennant race. Even though that sort of perception should not have an impact on decision-making, it is difficult for a club to act as if they were in a vacuum when every member of the media and many of their paying customers disagree with a move.

In terms of execution, even if the club ignores external pressures to send a young starter down or put him in the bullpen, the vagaries of a long season and the typical struggles of a young starter often force the organization’s hand. The team needs to find a balance between short-term and long-term goals, and it is often difficult to gauge what kind of impact a move made for “the now” will have down the line. When the club is in the midst of a pennant race and a young pitcher is struggling in the rotation, the priorities of the team may be altered and decisions that would not be made in Kansas City are undertaken to satisfy the needs of the current roster, often at the expense of the pitcher’s development. These factors combine to make for a inhospitable environment for young pitchers.

In all the excitement and joy of the 2009 championship season, there was one area of the club that simply was not very much fun. Joba Chamberlain’s starts over the last two months of the season were excruciating to watch, as the Yankees limited his innings to protect him arm. After all that, it would be quite frustrating to hear that the Yankees still overused him and that he is at risk for an injury. However, according to fantasy site Razzball’s well researched list of 20 pitchers at risk, Joba is in fact in danger of injury or weakened performance.

The criteria for getting on the list include having the previous season being your first full one as a starter, adding upwards of 700 pitches over the prior season, and extensive use of the slider, and Joba meets all three standards. Now, this system is by no means perfect, and the author of the study is still tinkering with the criteria. That said, I do think that the results can teach us something about the Yankees approach to young arms.

Whether it is Razzball’s system or the Verducci effect, Joba exceeded the totals that most freely available systems would have allowed him in 2009. As I have said a number of times in the past, it seems that the Yankees are a bit more liberal with their pitchers than people like Verducci would be. They tend to allow a jump of 40-45 innings over the previous career high, and do not seem to have an overall pitch limit. This is likely based on the results from a proprietary calculation on pitcher injuries and risk. This is an area where research has been largely incomplete, so it is hard to say whether the Yankees are being prudent enough. Hopefully, the results on Joba will help confirm the club’s process as reasonable and adequate.

Photo: Kathy Willens

From Chad Jennings:

For the most part, general manager Brian Cashman has left all of next year’s questions unanswered until the organizaton’s internal meetings take place, but this afternoon he gave his opinion on Phil Hughes and Joba Chamberlain.
“I look at them as starters that can relieve,” he said. “But I look at them as starters.”
Again, Cashman stressed that nothing is set in stone until he meets with his pro scouts, but it seems a good bet that the two young right handers will at least enter spring training as rotation candidates. Any innings limits, Cashman said, would not be significant.
“I would anticipate going into spring training with as much starting depth as possible,” Cashman said. “Plan on having a whole list of guys.”

While the Yankees generally like to jump a player about 40 innings per year, there are two different baselines from which that 40 inning clock can start. The club can either consider the previous season’s total as the baseline, or use the pitcher’s career high. It seems clear that the Yankees are using the career high, as further evidenced by their treatment of Joba CHamberlain this year. They allowed him to pitch almost 160 innings this season, despite the fact that he had only thrown 100 innings the season before. Conversely, his career high was either 112 innings in 2007, or 118 IP for Nebraska in 2005.

Based upon Cashman’s assertion that there will not be a significant cap on Phil’s innings, I would assume that the Yankees will be referring to his previous high as well, as he only threw 106 IP last season, leaving him near 145 for 2010 if the previous season was the baseline. However, his career high was 146 in 2006, meaning he may be allowed to exceed 180 innings. If so, the Yankees decision to place Hughes in the bullpen this season is further justified. He contributed mightily to a championship team, and will now be practically unfettered by limits going forward. This is very good news for the Yankees and those frustrated by the Joba rules in 2009.

With the new and improved Joba Rules now in place, the Yankees have a plan to keep Joba Chamberlain on regular rest while limiting his innings. Let’s look at the remainder of his scheduled starts and try to determine what that plan might be.

It seems evident that Joba’s limit is somewhere around 160 innings, and is currently at 133.2, leaving him with 27 innings for the regular season. This is how I would like his remaining starts to go:

September 4th at Toronto: 3 IP
September 9th vs Tampa: 3 IP
September 15th vs Toronto: 4 IP or 60 pitches, whichever comes first.
September 21st at LA: 5 IP or 75 pitches
September 27th vs Boston: 6 IP or 90 pitches
October 3rd at Tampa: 6 IP or 100+ pitches

This plan would allow Joba to build back towards full strength as the playoffs near, while keeping him in the rhythm that most pitchers find necessary to success. I think that this is the best way for the Yankees to meet all of their needs as well as protect their investment in Chamberlain. Would you plan differently?

The Joba Chamberlain issue is incredibly polarizing, as seemingly anyone who writes about baseball for a living has chimed in with their opinion. Yesterday, Wally Matthews checked in with his entirely predictable thoughts:

“We’re just trying to be smart about it,” Girardi said. “We’re not trying to overwork him his first time in the rotation for the whole year. There’s a history that has been studied by our people and this is what we feel is best.”

The Yankees’ “studies” seem to have omitted guys such as Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson, Warren Spahn and Nolan Ryan, all of whom threw 200-plus inning seasons at tender ages and went on to long, essentially injury-free careers, and ignored many of his contemporaries, such as Justin Verlander, Tim Lincecum and Felix Hernandez, who have done the same early in their careers so far without incident.

And they overlook the case history of Joba’s teammate, A.J. Burnett, who also was babied early in his career but still has suffered one injury after another.

So much for scientific “studies.” If a guy is going to get hurt, he’s going to get hurt, and no amount of coddling is going to prevent it, because at some point, they all have to go out on the field and play.

Wally’s theory is that caution should be thrown to the wind, and apparently these studies should be thrown out because some players have stayed healthy despite throwing plenty of innings. Of course, this ignores the concept of the exception proving the rule- the fact that everyone notes the same few pitchers suggests that they are the exception, and that many players who actually got hurt have been lost to the sands of time. Joel Sherman, in what seems to be a direct response to Matthews, brought up another critique:

I KNOW this is going to annoy many people of a certain age, but please stop comparing Joba Chamberlain’s innings to those of Tom Seaver and Bob Gibson and Nolan Ryan and Steve Carlton…..

Gibson did not pitch against a designated hitter. Aside from perhaps the 3-4-5 hitters, Gibson did not face many home run threats, so he could conserve against the tops and bottoms of lineups……

Gibson never faced hitters who watched their at-bats against him before and during games to pick up patterns. Gibson did not face an era of players steeped in the value of the long at-bat and drawing walks. Gibson enjoyed a larger strike zone and — at times — a higher mound. He did not use a more tightly-wound ball against lighter, whip-like bats designed to zip through the zone for more damage. And we haven’t even mentioned steroids yet.

If this were the NL in 1970, I would champion Chamberlain pitching 200-plus innings. But he is pitching in the AL in 2009. No batting practice fastballs. No soft spots in a batting order. Entire lineups addicted to working the count. Maple bats. Etc., etc., etc…..

Maybe genetics or throwing styles meant these guys were going to be injured whether they were babied or not. But to not have a plan to protect the most precious commodity in the sport is negligent…..

“You can’t ignore a plan because he has New York on his chest rather than Scranton,” Cashman said. “That would be irresponsible. That means the plan doesn’t mean anything, so why have a plan?”

Sherman’s article is about as lucid an argument you will find on the subject, and I strongly encourage you to read the entire thing. As he notes, the players of yore that Matthews brings up were playing in an era where pitching was king. SInce then, every single advance in the game has been tilted towards hitters, particularly in the AL. It is almost impossible to compare the workloads.

The Yankees are being cautious with their most precious asset, so that he pays off in the long term. Anything else would be shortsighted, and anathema to the long term goals of the organization. They created a plan, and are now sticking to it no matter what the situation. It is the right thing to do.

From Matt Ehalt:

Girardi also said that come playoff time, the Joba Rules may be waived as it will be “all hands on deck.”
“This is part of the plan, and this is what we have to do because this is not just about the next two months,” Girardi said of the varying degrees of rest between starts. “This is about years and years to come.”
While the Joba Rules in 2007 prevented Chamberlain from being overworked in the bullpen by doing things such as limiting back-to-back appearances, the Joba Rules 2009 is a formula to spread innings from now until the end of the season

I would guess that the Yankees have constructed their plan for the next 6 weeks while holding the possibility of playoff innings in mind. Girardi is not saying that the rules will go out the window come playoff time. Rather, the Yankees will limit his innings in the regular season while leaving some sort of cushion in the plan for the playoffs, when they need “all hands on deck.”

However, this may change how the Yankees order their rotation in the playoffs. Three weeks ago, I assumed Joba would be the 3 starter and Andy Pettitte the #4. However, with Pettitte’s resurgence and Joba’s inconsistency, I wonder if the Yankees might make Joba the 4 starter, due to both performance reasons and innings limits. This would assure that Joba gets at most 3 starts over the postseason, meaning that the most he would pitch over that time is about 20 innings. If he was the 3, he could get as many as 5 starts, which would require a much larger cushion.

What do you think? What should we expect?

According to Anthony DiComo on Twitter, Joe Girardi has announced that Joba Chamberlain will next pitch on Wednesday against Oakland. It had already been announced that Chad Gaudin would pitch on Sunday in Joba’s slot, and many thought that the Yankee plan would just involve skipping Joba’s starts by using Gaudin. It seems that the new Joba rules are a bit more intricate, as they will be giving him a few extra days between starts rather than just straight skipping him. This also has the effect of pushing Andy Pettitte from Wednesday to Friday against Boston, and lining up the rotation at Fenway with Pettitte, Burnett, and Sabathia hurling for the Yankees. Seems like a nice idea to me.

From Michael Salfino at SNY:

“Quasi-scientific” is too kind. The theory (Verducci Effect) is anti-science — something proffered with no evidence because it sounds true. In non-scientific, Woody Allen parlance, “It’s a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.”

The two biggest advocates, Verducci and Baseball Prospectus’ “injury guru” Will Carroll, have not yet cited any studies of it to the best of my knowledge. Carroll told me earlier this season when I was writing a broader piece on this subject that “he’s working on another study now.” We’re still waiting for those results to be published.

Well, all of us except Brian Cashman, who has clearly seen enough. Never mind that the only real multi-season study to date by David Gassko of the great HardballTimes.com in 2006 debunked it. VE pitchers under age 25 fared no worse in the following year than non-VE pitchers (those whose workload did not increase 30 or more innings) who also were under age 25.

Salfino goes on to list further flaws in the Verducci Effect theory, and I encourage you to read it. However, I do take issue with Salfino believing that major league clubs like the Yankees are depending on Verducci for their data. I am sure that the teams have done their own independent studies, and they may have reached a different conclusion than Verducci. Maybe they feel a 50 inning jump is too high, or they might be counting pitches rather than innings. It is really difficult for us to know. For example, the website razzball.com did a study that I linked to this offseason that found that an 700+ increase in pitches or throwing more than 27% percent of pitches as curveballs or sliders leads to a durability and performance problems the following season. They followed this study up with a list of 20 pitchers who fit their risk criteria. From the 13 riskiest pitchers on that list, 5 have seen a significant dip in performance while 3 have suffered major injuries. Being that there is no control group here, it is hard to determine how far from the norm these results are, but it seems that this study may be on to something.

The point is that it is hard to just set a cutoff of 30 innings over the player’s previous high and be confident that you are doing the right thing. The stress of each inning is different, as is the strain each type of pitch exerts on the arm. That being said, it is up to the fans to trust the team on this issue. They almost certainly know more about what each player can handle than we do.

From SI.com:

Reds right-hander Edinson Volquez is expected to miss a year after having reconstructive surgery on his right elbow.

Volquez had surgery Monday to repair a torn ligament and other damage in his pitching elbow.

The 26-year-old Volquez went 4-2 in nine starts before his elbow began bothering him. He has been on the disabled list since June 2.

Young pitchers need to be babied, because overuse can lead to serious injuries. Volquez progressed properly in terms of innings limits. He went from 127 to 140 to 155 to 180 to 196, never jumping more than 30 innings at a time. However, two seasons ago he was traded into the control of Dusty Baker, otherwise known as the destroyer of arms, or the man who killed Prior and Wood. He threw over 110 pitches 14 times last season as a 24 year old, including 5 times in his last 6 starts. His numbers to start this season were off from the start, and it seems that he will likely miss 2010 now as well. 

The next time someone complains to you about the restrictions the Yankees have placed on Joba Chamberlain’s innings, or curses Joe Girardi for pulling him after 98 pitches, point them towards Edinson Volquez. His truly is a cautionary tale. Will all young pitchers react to the workload in the same fashion as Volquez? Certainly not. Will some who are protected get hurt anyhow? Most definitely. But it is better to be safe than sorry, especially when dealing with an ace caliber arm.

From John Harper:

Except all indications are that he will be back in the bullpen by then, as he has now accumulated 110 innings, which might leave him only a handful of starts before the Yankees put the brakes on him.
And with Chien-Ming Wang officially out for the season after undergoing shoulder surgery yesterday, and Phil Hughes locked in as the eighth-inning setup man, the Yankees have few options to replace Chamberlain.

Harper goes on to suggest that Joba has a maximum of 50 innings left, and that the Yankees therefore need Roy Halladay to round out the playoff rotation. While I disagree with Harper on Halladay, as they really need a 3rd starter like Jarrod Washburn or a healthy Justin Duchscherer, he raises a fascinating question. What will the Yankees do with Joba Chamberlain?

I would be extremely shocked if they did not have Joba pitching in the postseason. That leaves two possibilities:

1) Let Joba throw regularly until he is about 15 innings short of his limit. This should take him to the start of September. At that point, replace him in the rotation with either Alfredo Aceves, Phil Hughes, or, if the Yankees make a trade and subsequently remove Mitre from the rotation, reinsert Mitre. Shut Joba down until the final week of the season, and then give him 5 innings out of the bullpen to keep him sharp. Then you have him in the bullpen for the playoffs, and the playoff rotation is CC, AJ, Pettitte, Aceves/Hughes/trade acquisition.

2) Start Joba once more and then move him to the bullpen until late September, replacing him with Hughes/Aceves/trade. Give him 3 starts at the end of the season to stretch out, and then start him i9n game 3 of the ALCS.

I think it depends on who they acquire at the deadline. If they add Washburn, I think they will feel comfortable starting him in a playoff game, and will move Joba to the bullpen once he nears his limit. If they cannot obtain a reliable starter, you may see them do something like option 2.

What do you think the Yankees should do with Joba?