YANKS’ FALLEN STAR
Before there was Jeremy Lin and Tim Tebow, there were those first loud moments when the bullpen doors would open at the old Stadium and Joba Chamberlain, a kid with a colorful name and backstory and fastball, would come through them, and the place would go mad with excitement.
It doesn’t mean it was exactly what it was like in February with Jeremy Lin, what it will be like now that the Jets have decided to upgrade the position of quarterback with the football equivalent of bringing in a member of the Kardashian family — or maybe the entire extended Kardashian family — with Tebow.
But it was still the Yankees, so it was big enough when they had their own instant rock star, out of Nebraska and the minors, who could throw it hard and past you and occasionally even throw it over the head of Kevin Youkilis of the Red Sox.
Joba came at us with a rush with that name and Native American in him and a mother who’d had substance abuse problems and a father in a wheelchair, and even though that wasn’t all a happy story, not by a longshot, it really was like some colorful character out of the past, as if Joba Chamberlain had walked out of some old baseball novel before he walked through those doors in the outfield.
There had been other phenom kids for the Yankees, of course, and one of those kids was an Oklahoma hayseed named Mickey Mantle who became one of the most famous — and star-crossed — great ballplayers the Yankees and baseball had ever seen.
But just like that, Chamberlain was the kind of instant star we like now in New York and America, a novelty act but one who could throw a baseball nearly 100 miles per hour. And that was the beginning of it, before the first things started to go wrong, and that included the weird moment in October of 2007, first round of the playoffs, when out of nowhere he was attacked by those bugs on the mound in Cleveland one night, when t he Yankees were supposed to be on their way to another World Series.
He didn’t get the outs he needed to get that night. The Yankees lost to the Indians. Then other things went wrong for him, went bad. The Yankees came up with their Joba Rules, treating him like some future Hall of Famer, developed those rules for him because he was theirs and that made him so much more special than all the other big young arms in baseball, yet he still made us watch.
Sometimes it went terribly wrong, and watching Joba became train-wreck video, the way it was when he was captured on tape stumbling around after his DUI arrest back home in Nebraska, the night Chamberlain was a lot more dangerous behind the wheel of his car than he ever was throwing fastballs. He was a starter and a reliever after that. He had big success as a set-up man i n the postseason of 2009, when the Yankees managed to win their first World Series since 2000. He wasn’t a rock star anymore, but he still had an arm, and he was still young.
Then came the Tommy John surgery. Now his ankle explodes in a rather catastrophic way as he was bouncing on a trampoline or horsing around with his son or whatever it was he was doing that ended up with him losing all that blood and being in surgery, coming out of surgery with his career in jeopardy, again.
And what he shows you, after all the bad luck he has had and some of the bad decisions he made and that were made for him by the Yankees is this:
How fragile these careers are, how fast you can lose more than your fastball, how fast the narrative changes for you, both on and off the field, at Yankee Stadium and in New York and everywhere else.
It isn’t even five years since it all happened, since he came out of the bullpen in August of 2007, struck out the first guy he saw, pitched two scoreless innings. He was going to be the next Mariano and then he was going to be the next great Yankee strikeout ace. And after all of it now, all the celebrity and instant fame and the way he rocked the old Stadium in a way few pitchers ever had, he has won exactly 20 games in the big leagues, he has an earned run average of 3.70, he has his one World Series ring. He has saved four games. He was born Justin Louis Chamberlain, and the story is that a young cousin started calling him Joba and it stuck and later it became his legal name. His dad, who had grown up on the Winnebago Indian Reservation in Nebraska before leaving the reservation to be treated for polio, said the name Joba was “dynamic.”
The whole story was dynamic. Even now, you can see Harlan Chamberlain, those pictures of him at the old Stadium watching his son pitch for the Yankees, the dad in his Yankee warmup jacket.
Now there is more surgery for Joba Chamberlain, this time on his ankle. Not even five years from that first sudden bright promise, he will be asked to come back again. He is 26.