Lights go out on Joba, and he has only self to blame

TAMPA— So the Joba chamberlain star-crossed era with the Yankees will apparently have the same sad ending as the Brien Taylor saga. Call it dumb and dumber for two Yankee golden-arm pitchers who threw away their careers with off-the-field hijinks.

In taylor’s case, it was a fist fight in December of 1993, defending his brother in some rural hamlet in North Carolina, during which he dislocated his left shoulder, the same shoulder that had earned him a record $1.55 million bonus from the Yankees. He never saw the bright lights of New York, never heard the cheers at Yankee stadium.

At least Joba got to see those lights and hear those cheers, and for a fleeting few months back in 2007 he electrified the city as few pitchers ever have before— a lethal setup reliever to mariano rivera.

Overnight Chamberlain became a cult figure, the subject of countless newspaper, magazine and TV features about this hulking kid out of the plains of Nebraska from a broken home, his mother a drug addict, raised by his wheelchair-bound dad.

Beginning with his call-up from Triple-a in august of that year, the Yankees nurtured and protected him, instituting the famed “Joba Rules,” preventing Joe Torre from using him on successive days.

They would continue to nurture and protect him in subsequent seasons as they tried to figure out where his bright future was — starting or relieving— but it wasn’t enough to prevent him from blowing out his elbow last June, requiring Tommy John surgery.

And it wasn’t enough to prevent him from nearly killing himself on Thursday afternoon in suffering a gruesome open dislocation of his right ankle while apparently playing on a trampoline with his 5-year-old son.

You can understand if the Yankees are just as exasperated as they are sad about all this. Here was a guy who was already on the disabled list, recovering from Tommy John ligament transplant surgery on his elbow.

He’d been explicitly told by the Yankee trainers not to engage in any sort of physical activity that would potentially put his arm in harm’s way. You would think they wouldn’t have had to tell him that, but then there had already been too many things in Chamberlain’s past to indicate he wasn’t gifted with a whole lot of common sense.

He didn’t handle the instant fame well, didn’t stay in shape in the offseasons and reported to camp overweight last spring. Then there was the October 2008 DUI conviction near his home in Lincoln, Neb., in which his police video wound up featured in the driver’s 13 episode of tru-tv Presents: “World’s Dumbest.”

Itwas as if he had a deathwish for his career and now he’s succeeded. This is an injury farworse than the blown-out elbow. The broken bone — on his push-off ankle — was out of the skin, blood was all over the place — “he could have died,” surgeons reportedly said — and very likely it will take more than one surgery to put everything back together.

It is highly unlikely Chamberlain will ever be able to pitch L again. ike Brien Taylor, a pitching career with unlimited possibilities is snuffed out with one dumb act. Taylor’s post baseball career has been evenmore disastrous — just a couple of weeks ago, he was arrested and charged with trafficking cocaine and crack and is facing a good part of the rest of his life behind bars.

One can only hope the next chapter of Chamberlain’s life will take a better turn.