The Kid Gloves Are On (Underneath The Kid Gloves)

Joba Rules Joba Rules Joba Rules.  I imagine even diehard denizens of the Yankee Universe are sick of the continuing refinement and rejiggering of the Joba Rules.  They were initially put in place to keep notorious bullpen bully Joe Torre from shredding Joba’s golden arm in the pursuit of World Series glory.  They’ve since been amended and/or rewritten in the service of making the transition from hard-throwing closer-in-training to well-rounded starter as painless as possible.

What this meant going into 2009 was limiting Joba’s usage to around 150 innings pitched. Entering yesterday’s start agains the Chicago White Sox, he was at 130.2 IP. With over a month, and approximately six starts for Joba, left in the regular season, that would mean he’d reach his cap if he simply pitched into the 6th inning every start. Faced with this dilemma, the Yankees’ initial plan was to start Joba less frequently going into October.  After deliberating for a day or so (give or take a handful of hours), they’ve instead chosen to start Joba regularly and limit his innings on a start-by-start basis so that he’ll be able to ease into a bug-free post-season.

Hence, yesterday’s White Sox start, wherein young Joba allows two runs in three innings and finds himself riding the pine after a mere 35 pitches.  If anything, it was by far his most efficient short start of 2009 — before Sunday, Joba started six games where he’s thrown over 80 pitches and left before the game’s been deemed official.  It goes without saying that being young, injury-prone, and averaging 20 pitches per inning is no way to go through life as a major league starting pitcher.  Ironically (and I think, for once, I’m using the damn word properly), it’s that maddening ineffciency that, in addition to giving the “Joba no start; Joba setup Mariano” crowd plenty of axes to grind, it has allowed Joba to avoid hitting his inning cap.

Now, whenever the topic of young starters and inning caps is broached, it doesn’t take long for the Verducci Effect to get mentioned.  As he explains in this 2008 article from Sports Illustrated:

It’s like training for a marathon. You need to build stamina incrementally. The unofficial industry standard is that no young pitcher should throw more than 30 more innings than he did the previous season. It’s a general rule of thumb, and one I’ve been tracking for about a decade. When teams violate the incremental safeguard, it’s amazing how often they pay for it.

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In 2005 and ’06 I found 17 pitchers I defined as at-risk of the YAE. None made it through the next year without an injury or a higher ERA. Ten of them broke down, the most seriously hurt being Francisco Liriano, Gustavo Chacin, Adam Loewen, Scott Mathieson and Anibel Sanchez. Eleven of them had worse ERAs, by an average of about a run and a half. Remember, it’s a general rule; there are exceptions, the superlative Justin Verlander being one.

The list of exceptions, they are a-growin’, and it’ll take one hell of an out clause to explain them away.  A list of potential at-risk pitchers, compiled by Beyond The Box Score’s Peter Bendix and RotoAuthority’s Tim Dierkes, whose workloads in 2007 and 2008 fell within the Verducci Effect parameters for the 2009 season, includes John Lester, Chad Billingsley, Tim Lincecum, Jair Jurrjens, John Danks, Clayton Kershaw, and, um, Zach Grienke.  Of course, the list does include ’09 lost causes like Ervin Santana and Manny Parra, but the efficacy of this theoretical spitballing is spotty at best.  Not that I’m the first one to figure that out — back in 2006, when Verducci first went public with his findings, The Hardball Times’ Dave Gassko debunked them using a more thorough statistical approach than yours truly, and came to the following conclusion:

Pitchers who see a large increase in workload are more likely to continue to be successful than those who don’t. It’s important to remember that correlation does not mean causation—just because throwing a lot more innings than a pitcher ever has before is correlated with future success does not mean that managers should be riding their young pitchers hard—but it does imply that Verducci’s argument is incorrect, and there is absolutely no reason that we should expect these [Verducci Effect] candidates to do worse because they’ve overworked.

Now while the Yankees are presumably not just taking last year’s numbers and adding thirty, the emphasis on innings pitched rather than pitch count (or even the types of pitches thrown) puts the Joba Rules in a less than favorable light.  It’s the same sort of approach that made the 100-pitch plateau some sort of starters’ Rubicon that only a select few could cross unscathed. These sorts of restrictions are good as back-of-the-napkin guidelines, but going from that to simply applying them in any and all cases is just as bad as ignoring any safety precautions and letting 20-year-olds throw 200-pitch complete games every third day.  (And, yes, I’ve been a Baseball Prospectus subscriber for over five years now, thanks for asking.  If you’re looking for the Cliff Notes’ version of their well-worn mantra, you can read this discussion between Bill James and SI’s Joe Posnanski about Nolan Ryan and the Rangers’ newly-instituted organizational philosophy regarding starting pitchers, as well as the 100-pitch threshhold.)

At any rate, all this hand-wringing, in Joba’s case, won’t matter in a couple of weeks — the Yankee brass is on record stating that they want to make sure that Joba’s ready to go deep into games when the post-season rolls around (and “the training wheels are off,” as MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch puts it in the Joba article linked to in the 1st paragraph).  Come next year, Joba will be treated like any other starter.  Unless he continues to throw upwards of 100 pitches in five frames or less, a la inefficiency expert Scott Kazmir.  Then it’ll be time to handle with care and take heed of these wise words from Baseball Prospectus contributor Rany Jayazerli:

Throwing is not dangerous to a pitcher’s arm. Throwing while tired is dangerous to a pitcher’s arm.