WELL before pitch counts rather than pitch locations determined how far a starter could go in a game, Dwight Gooden failed to get beyond the fifth inning in any of his first three major league outings.
In fact, Gooden failed to navigate past the fifth inning in five of his first eight starts for the Mets in 1984, pitching in those games to a 3-3 record with a 4.15 ERA before evolving into the transcendent 17-9, 2.60 ERA, 276-strikeout Rookie of Year we remember so well.
Maybe Joba Chamberlain will become that kind of a starting pitcher this season for the Yankees. Maybe he won’t. Maybe as he grows into a man Joba will indeed become the frontline ace everyone in the Yankees’ universe projects. Maybe he won’t.
Maybe the Kryptonite that some unseen nemesis has slipped into Chamberlain’s pinstripes before each of his first two big league starts will disappear with the shackles of restricted pitch counts. Maybe then the pedestrian starter will take off and fly.
“It’s hard to pitch to a count,” Alex Rodriguez said yesterday after Chamberlain spent his 78 pitches in 41/3 innings during which he yielded three runs (two earned) on five hits while striking out five and walking only the last Royals’ batter he faced. “As he gets his pitch count to 100, you’ll see a more confident Joba working with more conviction.
“It’s really hard to do what he’s doing.”
The debate may rage, but the decision has been made. Obama will be the nominee; uh, Chamberlain will be in the rotation, for better or worse. It’s certainly for the better when the Yankees get the kind of bridgework they did yesterday when Dan Giese and Jose Veras combined for 42/3 innings of scoreless relief before Mariano Rivera closed out the 6-3 victory over Kansas City.
The baseball season is a marathon. Brian Cashman is aware of that, so is Joe Girardi and, most importantly, so is Chamberlain. A June snapshot will fade before October.
“As a competitor, I want to be out there as long as I can, but you understand that it’s the beginning of June and that you have to be patient,” Chamberlain said. “Hopefully one or two more starts and that will be the case.”
Chamberlain was a starter until the Yankees, motivated last season by a short-term desperate need for a short-man to precede Rivera, transformed him into a set-up man. All of 22 years old, the starter’s mentality is all coming back to him.
“I’m getting back to the point between games where my preparation is for a dogfight in which you pitch out of jams,” Chamberlain said. “It’s coming back, slowly but surely.”
Everyone would love to accelerate the process. Everyone would love to see Chamberlain leave the bullpen for the pre-game walk to the dugout with the same swagger he brought to the mound from the bullpen in the late innings last year.
Still, slowly but surely can work if the bullpen does. That’s why whatever improvement Chamberlain showed from Tuesday’s start in which he needed 62 pitches to get through two-and-one-third against Toronto was secondary to the work provided by Giese as the long man and Veras as the set-up man.
Veras, 27, has some moxie to go with his heat. A scoreless eighth extended his shutout streak to 41/3 innings over his last three outings. Best of all, an effective Veras could put an end to the notion of Kyle Farnsworth as anything other than the bullpen mop.
Tyler Clippard could have done what Chamberlain did in his first two starts. Same for Jeff Karstens. Why, even Kei Igawa might have been able to match Joba pitch for pitch.
But it is Chamberlain and Chamberlain alone who has the opportunity to become the young Dwight Gooden, who, by the way, was not sent to the bullpen after eight starts to become the 1984 bridge to Jesse Orosco.