Joba Knows His Role This October

From Mark Feinsand:

"If they want me to fold towels, I'll fold towels," said Chamberlain. "I don't really care. Whatever they see fit, I want to help this team win in any role that I'm in."

Well, at least he accepts it. Hey, he could also put whip cream on towels if there are any walk-offs. So he's got that going for him, which is nice.

Here's some more post game quotes from Joba:

"In the playoffs, (relieving) is the only thing I've done, so that's the only thing I know," said Chamberlain, who was booed upon exiting last night's game. "At this point, I don't think there's any role I could be in that I'm not comfortable with."

...

"I know what the end goal is and I understand what I've done and the situation I've put myself in," he said. "You set yourself up to do the things you need to do, then let the chips fall where they may."

“It could have gotten a lot worse than it was, but it was just a lack of fastball command from the get-go,” Joba said. “You try to take a positive and look at the things you did OK; it could have been a lot worse, but we made some pitches when we had to.”

What pitches were those?

And from Girardi:

"It was not a good start," said Girardi, who tried to take some positives out of the 91-pitch performance. "We got his pitch count up, which was a good thing, but we didn't get his pitch count up in the amount of innings we wanted, so that's a bad thing. I would not consider this a quality start."

Following the game, Girardi wasn't prepared to make any of those decisions, although he may have hinted at his plans by mentioning several times that Chamberlain has had superb results pitching out of the bullpen during his brief career.

"We have a little bit of time to think about exactly what we're going to do, but he's had a lot of success out of the bullpen," Girardi said. "I can't guarantee that he's going to revert back to his old form if we do put him in the bullpen, but he does have a lot of confidence coming out of those gates."

Here's some stats to chew on... Chad Gaudin since August 12th: 2-0, 3.54 ERA, 40.2 IP, 40 H, 16 ER, 20 BB, 32 K, and the Yanks are 6-2 in those games.

Joba since August 6th: 2-5, 7.69 ERA, 45.2 IP, 62 H, 39 ER, 26 BB, 35 K, and the Yanks are 6-4 in Joba's games.

If Girardi is basing his decision on stats, which he probably should, then this one's a no brainer. A good idea, brought up by reader "Nutball Gazette" is that the Yankees give him an inning in relief this weekend and see what he can do coming out of the pen. I think they should make sure that if they do this he should face Tampa's better hitters as opposed to the three scrubs at the bottom of their order. They need to see if he can get quality hitters out coming out of the pen, because he hasn't been able to do it as a starter, at least not recently.