2007 Yankees

Allie02 wrote:

Interesting!

How do you guys do this fancy link thing where instead of an http address, it's the actual words that go into the link?

Thanks.

Click Here to see how to use the url code. You can also look way down at the bottom left corner of the page here where it says "vB code is On". If you click on link there it will take you to the same page which shows you how to do pretty much anything.

Joba "comes with instructions" according to Cashman (btw, I love that guys name as the GM for Steinbrenner, I hope the irony is not lost on you yankee fans) on Mike and The Mad Dog. The specific instructions are that he's only allowed one or two innings and they have to be at the beginning, and if it's one, not the next day, if it's two it's not until two days. That's ridiculous. I can't wait till the guy flops.

smithnic wrote:

Joba "comes with instructions" according to Cashman (btw, I love that guys name as the GM for Steinbrenner, I hope the irony is not lost on you yankee fans) on Mike and The Mad Dog. The specific instructions are that he's only allowed one or two innings and they have to be at the beginning, and if it's one, not the next day, if it's two it's not until two days. That's ridiculous. I can't wait till the guy flops.

That is nice. You can't wait until someone fails. That is the spirit.

Anyway, X, what is that about Johnny's calves? Is that some kind of joke? lol
I don't find him attractive, just funny.

JSBE wrote:

makes all the sense in the world that they would want to be so protective of him because you KNOW torre would run him out there every game if he could.

i was reading something (i think it might have been today's boston globe) but a scout said that joba is nowhere near ready to be a starter in the bigs (seeing as it is first year in pro ball, that is understandable) but that he def. has the goods for a one at a time inning type guy for the stretch run.

i'll be curious as to what happens to him next season. does he go back to the minors to learn to be a complete starting pitcher or does he stick around and apprentice under mariano (should they re-sign mariano)?

i have yet to see him pitch live and i doubt i will until the yanks play the sox next week (i'm not staying up until 1am est to see him maybe come into a game against the angels this week).

Whoa, wait....think about signing Mariano??? I don't follow the inside track of the game, sorry. I get my news from my Dad. If Mariano leaves, that wouldl really stink.
Joba is totally not ready to start. The kid is 21. He has a lifetime ahead of him in his career.

This is a great piece from todays NY Daily News about Jobas ailing father .


The book on Joba

Father and son write pitcher's next chapter

BY ANTHONY MCcARRON
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER

Sunday, August 19th 2007, 8:25 AM

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Harlan Chamberlain, wearing a Yankees cap in his home in Lincoln, Neb., holds a photo of himself and his son, a young Joba (below).

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Harlan Chamberlain holds a ball signed by Reggie Jackson saying that Joba 'is the real deal!'
Two fields stood across the street from Joba Chamberlain's house in Lincoln, Neb., one grass, one gravel, and on summer evenings, kids from across the whole neighborhood in the northeast part of town would gather outside to play baseball. The Chamberlains kept enough gloves and bats for everyone and Joba's father, Harlan, would umpire games from his wheelchair, offering coaching tips between calls.

When there wasn't a game, Chamberlain and his father still played catch in the yard, even during the winter. "If it wasn't blowin' or a million degrees below zero, we were out there," Harlan Chamberlain says.

The aluminum siding on the house had hundreds of dents. The father would urge the boy to dive for grounders. The boy would get dirty. The father never yelled.

Harlan couldn't use his left hand, so he would catch the ball with his right, take off the worn Wilson glove he'd bought back in 1972, and throw the ball back to his son. The boy threw his hardest until he was 8 years old. That's when the father said his hand couldn't take the sting anymore.

"It was always all about baseball," Joba Chamberlain says now, smiling. Both men say those memories are among the fondest of their lives.

Now the boy plays at Yankee Stadium, the thunderous roar of fans who have taken to him like a son of Nebraska takes to Cornhusker red pounding in his ears. A blistering, 99-mile-per-hour fastball and a biting breaking pitch have made him a cult hero in the Bronx. The 55-year-old father, back in Lincoln, watches the games on a computer, his nurse nearby, a Yankee cap on his head, his heart swelling.

It is seemingly all about baseball, still. But there is so much more to the Chamberlains' story than fastballs, fist pumps and cheering fans.


***
It is the life of Harlan Chamberlain, a strong man who never let a body ravaged by polio or a childhood spent in a hospital and in foster care destroy him. It includes a broken marriage and Harlan raising his two kids himself in a two-bedroom house, one room for his daughter, Tasha. For 11 years, Harlan and Joba slept in the same bed. Money was sometimes so tight that Harlan pawned his valuables to provide for his children.

Joba knows his dad's history, how he was apart from his family, which lived on the Winnebago Indian Reservation, 107 miles north of Lincoln. How his father agonized through the disease that left him with a limp and, later, a motorized scooter. Harlan can still recite the total time he spent in the hospital - "six years, five months and 11 days."

"It's been rough, but it gave me the strength to be the person I am today," Harlan says. "In raising my children, I wanted them to have the nurturing and the love and respect that I didn't get a whole lot of growing up."

Says Joba: "He's been given limitations, but we all have limitations in life. Not once in my life did he ever ask why. He's taken it and run with it. People tend to make a bigger deal of it than it is."

While his father's struggle has helped him gain perspective, so has Joba's own life. His parents were divorced when he was a toddler. Joba is circumspect about his current relationship with his mother, saying only, "I talk to her every once in a great while. She's a mom, I'll always love her. It's never too late. That's about all I can say about that."

When he was 12, his best friend, Nate Raun, died of brain cancer on Thanksgiving Day. Joba still wears a uniform number that adds up to eight - he's got No. 62 with the Yankees - because Raun's number in youth baseball was 8. He still keeps in touch with Raun's family and says, "I know he's still part of my life."

Joba has helped care for his father for years, doing things around the house his dad couldn't. When Harlan has been sick, Joba and his sister have been there. A year ago, Harlan's appendix burst and his temperature soared to 104.8 degrees. Joba recalls that doctors told him that if Harlan had gotten to the hospital "20 or 30 minutes later," his body would have started shutting down. Harlan spent 13 days in intensive care and is still recuperating - it's why he hasn't yet seen Joba pitch for the Yankees in person.

His father's attitude has helped, too. Joba knows how hard it was for Harlan to admit in 1991 that he needed a scooter to get around. When he got one, it opened up his whole life again and Harlan hasn't stopped since, working as an usher at Nebraska sporting events after retiring from his job as a prison counselor for 27 years. He's still a fixture at area high school games, too, and the other day was calling a bingo game for senior citizens.

Harlan has always believed in himself, and his children. "What parent worth his salt doesn't?" Harlan asks. Perhaps that is where Joba got the confidence to reach the majors so quickly and even to playfully tweak Derek Jeter, the Yanks' master needler, in the clubhouse.

"Everything we've been through, it shapes who you are," Joba says. "I wouldn't change anything in the world the way I grew up and all the things I had and didn't have."


***
Joba, whose birth name was Justin, became Joba on a visit to the reservation when he was a baby. While the family was there, a young relative couldn't pronounce her own brother's name, calling him "Jah-bah" instead of Joshua. Everyone started calling Harlan's son that, too, and it stuck. He eventually legally changed his name to Joba. Harlan decided on the spelling.

Joba, born and raised in Lincoln, has strong feelings about his family and his heritage. He's proud of being the highest-drafted Native American and has long been a star on the reservation, where he is besieged by autograph requests when he visits relatives. Joba was on the front page of the latest edition of the Winnebago Indian News.

But the game wasn't always a possible career. Joba was such an ordinary baseball prospect when he was in high school at Lincoln Northeast that he was sometimes better known for being a ballboy for the school's high-powered basketball teams. Part of the problem was that a pudgy ballboy was cute. A pudgy pitcher, not so much.

At his heaviest, Joba weighed 272 pounds. He says he is around 230 today. Nebraska coach Mike Anderson did not recruit the local boy. "He was way, way, way too big," Anderson says.

Joba did not have a scholarship offer the summer after high school until he got a call in July from Damon Day, the coach at Division II Nebraska-Kearney. One of Day's players knew Chamberlain and the coach was looking to fill out a thin pitching staff. "We liked him, not to the point where I thought he'd be setting up for Mariano Rivera one day, but where I thought he'd throw strikes and get some guys out," Day says.

He pitched well enough at Kearney to transfer to Nebraska, a Division I program. Harlan, working as an usher, would wait for Anderson near an entryway to lobby the coach to take his boy. It was still a risk, Anderson says, but Joba bloomed.

The Yankees took him 41st in the 2006 draft, using a sandwich pick they got for losing free agent Tom Gordon. He has had a meteoric rise through their system, going from Single-A to the majors this season. Mark Newman, the Yankee executive who oversees the minor leagues, says he can't remember a player in his 19 years with the organization who has ascended four levels in one year. Not even Jeter.

Now the whole state of Nebraska is following Joba's journey. Anderson, eating dinner with his wife recently, got goosebumps when he saw Joba's familiar fist-pump on the restaurant's television. Harlan got a call from a foster brother from a small, mid-Nebraska town who said everyone there was buzzing about his son making the Yankees.

At Joba's high school, Lincoln Northeast, students were already talking about going to Kansas City - the nearest major-league city - to watch Joba when the Yankees are there Sept.7-9, says Reed Stephenson, the school's assistant athletic director.

"We're right proud of where he's gone," Stephenson says. "I can't go through a whole day without someone talking about him here."


***
Back in Lincoln, Harlan is getting antsy. He watches Joba's games on the Internet and saw one of them in a sports bar, but he wants to experience Yankee Stadium, touch the pinstripes on his boy's chest. But he's not well enough to travel. "I'm so close I can taste it," Harlan says. "I don't want to be out of my bubble until I'm cleared by my doctor. The long-term picture is great and I want to enjoy it."

"They are an amazing story of love," Day says. "There is a man who loves his father and a father who loves his son. They have been through a lot together and they've stuck together. It's a special thing."

Rook couldn't take Manhattan

More than a year before Yankee fans were chanting Joba Chamberlain's name at the Stadium, he had a very different connection to city baseball - he was the losing pitcher in Manhattan College's upset victory over Nebraska in the NCAA regionals on June 2, 2006, the biggest win in Jaspers history.

Chamberlain, the Cornhuskers' ace, gave up homers on consecutive pitches to Matt Rizzotti and John Fitzpatrick, who are both in the minor leagues, and was knocked out in the eighth inning of Manhattan's 4-1 victory. Still, Chamberlain made an impression - Manhattan coach Kevin Leighton says the pitcher cranked up the same fist pump he flashes now when he struck out Manhattan's No. 3 hitter to complete a 1-2-3 first inning.

"That first inning, I thought we were in for a long day," Leighton says. "You could just tell this guy had big-league potential."

Following all the fuss about Chamberlain's Yankee debut, Leighton watched a DVD of Manhattan's win and noticed that he still throws the same slider. Chamberlain's fastball was clocked at 93-96 miles per hour, Leighton says.

That day, Manhattan was playing at Nebraska's field in front of the largest crowd the Jaspers had ever seen - 8,063 - with the Huskers' famed football stadium looming over the left-field wall. It was the school's first tourney game since 1957.

Rizzotti, who was drafted in the sixth round this June by the Phillies, and Fitzpatrick, who plays for the Pirates' rookie-league team, gave Manhattan a jolt. Chris Cody, a pitcher in the Brewers' system, outdueled Chamberlain by throwing a complete game.

Manhattan eventually was eliminated after losing twice to Miami, but beating Chamberlain remains "the biggest win in our program's history," Leighton says. "I'd like to think it's one of the biggest for our school in any sport."

Oh Bathgate...thank you for posting that! What an incredible story. I remember when I was watching the game this afternoon, I saw Joba looking into the stands as everyone was cheering for him and he just looked so humbled and so proud. It nearly broke my heart.
And then when he went into the dugout and Clemens gave him the 'you did good, kid' swat. That is why I love baseball.

Clemens got his 1000th K as a Yankee yesterday.

JSBE wrote:

i was reading something (i think it might have been today's boston globe) but a scout said that joba is nowhere near ready to be a starter in the bigs (seeing as it is first year in pro ball, that is understandable) but that he def. has the goods for a one at a time inning type guy for the stretch run.

i'll be curious as to what happens to him next season. does he go back to the minors to learn to be a complete starting pitcher or does he stick around and apprentice under mariano (should they re-sign mariano)?

what i've heard is that his curve and change aren't quite ML ready yet. he's mostly been using his fastball and slider while mixing in the occasional curve. a good reliever can survive on two pitches but he'll need to develop the rest of his arsenal in order to be an equally-effective starter.

he's gonna be a starter next year. my guess is that he'll begin the season at AAA.

Allie02 wrote:

there was a thing in the Times magazine about Steinbrenner

basically saying that the the era of hating baseball b/c of the things that he does (like buy superstars) is over..


I don't like how they have to fly out to Anaheim and then turn around and play tomorrow night w/o any time off. I hope they won't be too jet lagged. We always have trouble w/Anaheim.

I'm sure the Angels aren't crazy about playing in Boston and then flying back without the luxury of an off-day.

Allie02 wrote:

ooh they don't get an off day either? Good, then they'll be tired too. Maybe we'll have an edge!
who goes tomorrow night?

phil hughes.


at least it wasn't a sunday night game. a few years ago the white sox played the orioles on sunday night and then they played at 12:35 on Monday.