Over at Pitchers and Poets, Ted Walker has a long piece on Joba Chamberlain called “Private Anxiety Made Public in Baseball’s Age of Potential”:
Joba Chamberlain elicits a negative response from the average baseball fan that far outweighs his time spent as a big league pitcher. For a few years, Chamberlain was the lightning rod for Yankee-hating, embodying what outsiders disliked about the team.
The Yankees fan base, meanwhile, accustomed to a team that develops its own foundational members, asked too much of the kid. The Yankees called him up to the big leagues after just a year in the minors. In the hustle to nudge him, with Robinson Cano and Phil Hughes, up onto the Yankees pedestal once occupied by the four horsemen, Yankee fans made him Joba before he was Chamberlain. In the rest of the country, his unique first name became a slight, and a shorthand term for a long-held distaste for the Yankees. Soon, the name Joba came to symbolize a fatigue not only for the team’s ruthless big money practices, but also for the media’s clear favoritism towards East Coast franchises.
That Joba Chamberlain was the symbol of this sentiment is misguided and unfortunate, and more a result of bad timing than anything that Joba did. Because, generally speaking, Joba Chamberlain is the opposite of what people don’t like about the Yankees.
[Photo Credit: NJ.com]
Wait, there are people who don't like the Yankees?! Unpossible!
Meanwhile Ivan Nova is quietly becoming a big league pitcher.
Oh, Joba. Ya' just never know. The kid's still just 25 for Mo's sake. There are instances of pitchers coming back from TJ surgery throwing harder, correct? I know there is lots of Joba disdain round these parts, but I hope he's back some time after next year's All Star game. Some stories are worth rooting for even if he acts like a fool half the time.
[1] Meanwhile Ivan Nova is quietly becoming a big league pitcher.
Funny that. They've left him in the rotation and through the ups and downs he's managed to start to develop into at least a back end starter. Thank heavens the organization did not make the shocking discovery that his stuff would "play better" if he pitched only one inning in relief.
[2] I don't hold him in disdain. I hold the organization's handling of a potential starter in disdain.
[3] I never felt that Joba played better as a one inning pitcher, or inning for that matter.
Hatas gon hate.
I think that article missed what I think is the main reason many people quickly grew to dislike Joba: his early trademark roar. Like or not, public displays of emotion rub people the wrong way. The fact that he was doing it as a brash 21 year old for the Yankees was even worse. Even though he toned down his emotions, that reputation is hard to live down.
'effin midges.
[7] Hey, didn't you used to be WilliamNY23? If so, when and why did you transmogrify?
[9] Yes, one and the same. The transformation took place when I began contributing the weekly CBN post. The name used in the byline is the same for the comments.
[7] I love Joba's roar. (I loved Monica's grunts, too.) And I can't understand why a show of enthusiasm would bother people. Isn't it great to be joyful? I do appreciate the concept of winning like you except to win and losing with grace. And I detest the ridiculous showboating that goes on after every G.D. play, no matter how inconsequential, in every G.D. NFL game.
But this game of baseball needs a little color some time. Joba is our color man from the pen. (Swish on the field).