Joba Chamberlain felt better about his changeup this spring than he has in a long time. Of course, now that he's headed back to the bullpen, he won't have many opportunities to use it.Interestingly, it wasn't like he stayed away from the fastball as a starter, in fact, Joba actually threw a higher percentage of fastballs as a starter. Here's his PitchFX Type breakdown via Fangraphs:
Chamberlain plans to return to the fastball-slider combination that made him so successful in the eighth-inning setup role in 2007 and '08.
"Those are the pitches we're going to go to," Chamberlain said yesterday. "We're still going to have the other ones in case you have to fool someone every once in a while, but those worked out of the bullpen before so we'll continue to go to those."
| Season | FA% | SL% | CU% | CH% | FT% | IN% | PO% | Pitches |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | 61.6 % | 34.7 % | 2.6 % | 1.1 % | 0.0 % | 0.0 % | 0.0 % | 190 |
| 2008 | 64.9 % | 22.8 % | 9.4 % | 2.3 % | 0.0 % | 0.5 % | 0.1 % | 1695 |
| 2009 | 63.3 % | 19.0 % | 12.1 % | 4.8 % | 0.6 % | 0.1 % | 0.2 % | 2715 |
This could obviously could just due to the small sample size in 2007, but regardless, I doubt we'll see much of a jump in the number of fastballs he throws. What we will likely see is a rise in the % of the time he goes with the slider because as you can see, that was the pitch he stayed away from in order to throw more curves and changeups.
While it's expected that he won't need his secondary pitches as much coming out of the pen, I have to wonder how the Yankees can continue to say he could start in the future if he spends another season focusing on only the fastball and slider. To me, this has to be a sign that the Yankees are pretty set on the idea of having Joba stay in the pen and one day be this team's closer. Which is actually fine by me, even if I am a Joba-to-the-rotation guy. It's better than having him twist in the wind every year wondering what his role actually is.
