When the Yankees called Joba Chamberlain up to the big leagues they did so with a prepackaged guide on how to use the talented righthander. If he pitches one inning, you can't use him the next day and if he pitches two innings he can't pitch for two more days. He also can't enter a game in the middle of an inning because his training is as a starter and his relief experience is limited to his brief major league service.
The Joba rules are well known by now because Michael Kay won't stop talking about them during his each and every appearance. He mixes his disbelief that the Yankees are treating him with kid gloves with the wild-eyed hero worship familiar to any watcher of the YES network. Part of his disbelief has to be because he's called so many games that featured the Joe Torre rules. The Torre rules state that if a reliever has won your trust you use him as much as possible with no concern for overwork or diminishing returns and you certainly never take a chance on seeing what a younger, less established reliever might be able to offer. It's why Chris Britton never got a chance this season and why Edwar Ramirez found himself in tears after two weeks of no use left him with a heavy layer of rust.
After Kyle Farnsworth nearly blew last night's game against the Red Sox it came as no surprise that there was a call to abandon the Joba rules and take the reins off the kid. The New York Post's George King reports today that Torre has shown interest in using Chamberlain based on pitch counts as opposed to innings pitched. On the surface it makes sense, not all innings are created equal, but as Tim Marchman of the New York Sun writes that a deeper analysis shows that it might not bear any more fruit.
Seattle's J.J. Putz has been, by any metric you care to choose, the best reliever in baseball this year. Fangraphs.comcredits him with having been worth five wins; he's one of just three pitchers who has been worth more than four. Baseball Prospectus, which also tracks reliever performance this way, arrives at the same results. This is why it makes perfect sense to restrict Chamberlain; the difference between the best reliever in baseball and an average one is worth less than a win per month. No reliever, no matter how good, is going to singlehandedly mean the difference between making the playoffs and not making them during September. Baseball is a team sport.
That argument loses some strength when you are watching Chamberlain pump pitches past hapless hitters but it is ultimately a sound one. If the Yankees are assured of having Mariano Rivera in the ninth inning and get good starts from three-fifths of the rotation every time through there shouldn't be a drastic need for a change in the way you use Chamberlain. If you want to argue that they should be starting Chamberlain on Saturday instead of calling up Ian Kennedy, I'm all ears, but when the argument is for Torre to destroy another reliever the way he has done in the past it's falling on deaf ones.
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