Hughes' time in the pen helped him perfect the fist pump Stephen Dunn/Getty Images

I think I’m ready to believe that Phil Hughes’ detour to the pen in 2009 was a good thing not only for the Yankees, but for Hughes’ development as a pitcher.  While many fans were not thrilled to see such a promising young starter shuttled to the bullpen to fill a need, it appears as if the move paid off.  While big time starting pitching prospects are now rarely developed in the bullpen, this used to be the norm, not the exception.

In an article by Anthony McCaron in the Daily News, Hughes expresses his that he gained confidence last year and now he finally feels like he’s in the majors to stay.  Now you can’t expect every young starter to dominate as much as Hughes did out of the pen in 2009, but how can he not have gained confidence, consistently retiring Major League hitters?  As a reliever, stated Hughes, “you don’t have the luxury of pitching around guys,” he said. “You have to get outs quick and I try to take that mentality into starting.”  This may be a case of hindsight, but the results cannot be argued.

In recent times, the most glaring example of a starting pitcher developing in the pen has been Johan Santana, but as a Rule 5 pick there were extenuating circumstances.  The Twins had to keep Santana in the majors, or risk losing him, and they didn’t think he was ready to be a full time starter.  The bullpen to rotation development (even with some shuffling) clearly worked out for the Twins and Santana.  Earl Weaver was famous for bringing up young starters and getting them MLB experience in the pen before putting them in the rotation full time.  Go look at the B-Ref pages for Jim Palmer, Mike Flanagan, Dennis Martinez, and Scott McGregor.  They all pitched primarily out of the pen when they came up, and when inserted into the rotation full time they avoided many of the early struggles that young pitchers face.  Sure it helps that they were good pitchers, but so were Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine, who were in the rotation from the start, and they paid for it. You can’t argue with how their careers turned out, but would they have been better served pitching out of the pen for a year?  Could the wave of the future with developing young starters to be to go back to the past?

Hughes is far from a finished product, and will certainly take some lumps throughout the year. He’s still just 23 years old and of course on an innings limit, but there is no longer doubt that Hughes will be part of the Yankees rotation for years to come.  Maybe Joba Chamberlain’s extended internship in the bullpen will help him develop as a better starter in the future.  While there’s no guaranteed way to develop a pitcher and get results, would teams be better off working more young pitchers into the rotation via the bullpen?

Hughes and Joba took today's news in stride

Our love of guest posts continues.  Pete, known over at RAB for his ridiculously long (but always informative) posts brings his take on the Yankees #5 starter announcement.  And since it’s Pete, it’s perfectly titled as “A Long-Winded Attempt To Console Myself”

Earlier today, we learned what many of us had hoped the beat writers had been wrong about for the last few weeks: Phil Hughes will be the Yankees 5th starter to start the season. If you’re like me, you probably reacted by engaging in the 500+ comment diatribe-fest over at RAB, broke a few things, and searched desperately for some way in which this wasn’t a bafflingly poor decision by the Yanks.

Until today, I largely ignored the generally baseless “Hughes Will Be Yanks’ #5” articles and tweets that have been proliferating the MSM for the past few days, since most of them seemed to be coming from celebrated B-Jobbers, and none of them seemed to include any actual quotes from Girardi or Cashman that indicated with authority which of the two (or, to be more democratic, five) it would be. Following suit, I ignored, with even more vigor, the strangely flippant assertions of “Joba will be in the bullpen” that accompanied, almost as an afterthought, these articles.

Until today.

When I first heard the news today, I thought maybe the Yanks would send Joba down to Scranton to start the year, which made more and more sense the more I thought about it. Hughes’s initial callup was April 24th, 2007, which means that at any time after April 24th, 2010, Hughes’s options cannot be exercised without him passing through waivers. As a MLB-minimum-making, high-upside, MLB-ready starter, I’d put the odds of Hughes passing through waivers unclaimed at any time this year at around -238847923%, give or take. Really not ideal odds for that kind of maneuver. Joba, on the other hand, wasn’t called up until August of the same year, which means that his “waiver clock”, as it shall henceforth be known, doesn’t start until August of this year.

The effect this could have on 2010 roster construction is actually pretty consistent with Hughes being the #5 starter. It appears that the Yankees consider them at roughly equal points (or that Hughes is ahead) in terms of expected performance this year as starters, so it would make sense to send to the minors the guy who could come up for a month to take an injured starter’s place and still be able to go back down to the minors afterwards. In other words, if Hughes was the #6 and got called up to take, for example, Andy’s spot in May, and Andy comes back in June, then the Yanks would be handcuffed, and forced to keep Hughes on the MLB Roster. Joba, on the other hand, could just go back down to the minors after filling in, at least theoretically.

Of course, this was only wishful thinking in the extreme. Not only have all of the beat reporters been reporting that Joba is going to the ‘pen (and their irrelevance might have taken a hit with the Hughes news), but now it appears that he is slotted for a one inning appearance on Saturday. There isn’t a whole lot left that suggests that the Yankees don’t want him in the bullpen to start the year.

So back to the drawing board I went. Why, after cautiously developing the guy as a starter for two years, would the Yankees just give up on him and send him to the bullpen?

The answer is actually pretty simple: Phil Hughes. Hughes pitched out of the ‘pen for the majority of last year, and hasn’t thrown a full season as a starter since 2006. Even in that season, he only accumulated 146 innings. Yet the Yankees FO feels that he is capable of handling a full season (or, at the very least, most of a season) of starting this year. If they feel that that is possible with Hughes, who is to say they don’t think  Chamberlain could do the same next year?

While there is some debate as to whether or not the Yankees felt that Joba’s 110 official innings from 2007 represented his career high, or whether it was the 160ish number from college+winterball the year before, but no matter how you spin it, Joba jumped from 100 innings in an injury-shortened season in ’08 to 157 innings last year. Undoubtedly, there is some injury concern there. I suspect that the Yankees could have felt that they could capitalize on a surplus of good starting pitching this year by avoiding pushing Joba’s innings up for a second year in a row.

I realize that the consensus, based on some things Eiland said in February, is that Joba has no innings caps anymore. But it’s still plausible that the Yankees feel that there is a better chance of Joba being a quality starter in 2011 if he isn’t forced to push himself past his previous thresholds again this year.

Hughes, on the other hand, is at a point where it’s probably unwise for the Yankees to pass up any opportunity to get him another year’s worth of starts. Much like Joba last year, however, it makes more sense for Hughes to get those starts at the Major League level, since he has shown that he can dominate the minors but has never gotten the chance to labor through a full season at the MLB level. I think the Yankees feel that they have the lineup, bullpen, and rotation strength and depth to carry an inconsistent fifth starter again this year, and I think it’s important to them that Hughes gets MLB development time as well, just like Joba did last year.

Basically, I don’t think that the Yankees consider Joba pitching out of the bullpen this year to be permanent. The fans and the media have a tendency to overreact and to assume correlation equals causation a lot of the time, so many consider the Joba Rules of 2008, where Joba began the year in the ‘pen and then transitioned into the rotation later on, to be part of the reason why Joba got injured that year. I, for one, don’t buy that, and I don’t think the FO does either. In fact, I expect Joba to slide back into the rotation some time in August, right around the time when Hughes should probably slide out due to approaching innings caps.

So why, after 3 years of starter development, have the Yankees given up on Joba the Starter? They haven’t. They just feel that it is of utmost importance that Hughes the Starter be just as ready for 2011 as Joba the Starter is. Remember, these two could be #3 and #4 for us next year. It’s not unreasonable to think that the uptick Hughes’s performance will undergo next year, after getting a full season in the Majors under his belt, will be greater than the uptick Joba’s performance would have done in the same time frame, after getting his second full season in the majors under his belt.

But don’t think that just because Joba is in the pen now means that the book has closed on Joba in the rotation. It’s possible, but it would represent a massive change in both direction and intellectual capacity from both Girardi and Cashman, and I think it’s way too early to make that kind of assumption.

So have no fears, folks, the Opening Day starting rotation for 2011 will include both Hughes and Chamberlain. In the meantime, we’ll have to settle for a rotation of CC/AJ/Javy/Hughes, and a bullpen of Mo/Joba/D-Rob/Marte/Ace/Park/Mitre (or Melancon). Poor us.