Skip Bayless shouldn't talk.

Caveat to this post: I am no FireJoeMorgan, nor do I try to be.

Home from work today I sat down and caught First Take on ESPN which is something I often like to do. It is a mixture of morning show and sports that is easy to put on in the background while reading, or in the case of this morning while eating a delicious breakfast sandwich I made for myself and my roommate. I also really love to see what Skip Bayless has to say because most of the time it is comical, unintentionally of course (which is the best time of humor sometimes.) After he proclaimed Brett Favre's aura and mystique would take the Jets to 12 wins, the subject turned to baseball. UH-OH!

The question posed to Skip was "Did Steinbrenner ruin the Yankees season by forcing Joba to be a starter?" First things first: starters are much more valuable than relievers. 190 innings of excellent pitching is better than 80 innings, it is really not that difficult to understand. Moving Joba was the right decision.

Skip's response was saying that 1."they reinvented an overpowering reliever; and made him become a starter" and 2."he started becoming curveball happy, throwing one after another, not depending on his overpowering fastball."

As far as reinventing a reliever and making him a starter here are his numbers from college and Minor league Baseball. 50 apperances, 47 starts. Two of those relief appearances coming in his last stop before the majors in AAA. No doubt those two were getting him ready for his relief role with the Yankees. That means his entire professional career before the majors, and his entire amatuer career above high school were as a starter. But was he good in that role? In those Minor league appearances that he started he accumulated a strikeout per 9 rate of 13.79, while walking only 2.76 per 9 innings. He had a WHIP of 1.01. That is really good. They hadn't reinvented a reliever, they merely allowed him to do what he had always done, allowed him to be more valuable to their team. He got tendonitis, relievers get it too. Pitching is a violent motion. Hank Steinbrenner did not give Joba Chamberlain a shoulder injury.

As long as I'm on a roll, The Hardball Times did a study on Joba as a starter versus reliever and how effective he was. They concluded that he threw his curveball at approximately the same rate as when he was a reliever, about 7% of the time. Now, Skip may not know the difference between a curveball and a slider which Joba throws about 25% of the time and is basically unhittable. See, Hardball Times used actual research and Pich f/x identification where Bayless used shoot from the hip assumptions from his living room viewings.