Favre Traded To Jets; Revisionist History With Chamberlain

• Brett Favre traded to the New York Jets:

These are the Jets we're talking about, so there's every possibility that the podium will

collapse during the introductory press conference and Favre will tear the ligaments in his shoulder breaking his fall, thereby ending his career; but other than that, if Fav...ruh's committed to playing for at least the next two years, it's a great move to make the Jets contenders

to advance to the second round of the playoffs as a lowpoint goal. The guy can still play and will make a fortune with advertising deals and other perks in the tri-state area----at least as much and possibly more than the marketing deal the Packers offered for him to stay retired.
Packers fans had better be prepared to deal with the growing pains of young, unproven quarterback Aaron Rodgers because if he gets off to a slow start while their hero is worshipped in the Big Apple and winning games, there's going to be a backlash against the Packers management team even if they were put into this impossible situation by Fav...ruh himself and his vacillating.

• Digging up the criticisms on Joba Chamberlain:

If the reports are to be believed the Yankees got great news in that Joba Chamberlain's injury is only rotator cuff tendinitis; tendinitis hurts (it feels like waves of prickling pain shooting down the affected area), but it's certainly not serious and not the devastating result

that Yankeeland was bracing itself for with bated breath. What was fascinating during the time spent in limbo awaiting Chamberlain's diagnosis was how many people came out of the woodwork with quotes like this one from Joel Sherman's column in the New York Post:

It is a reminder of what a lot of personnel men have been saying since the Yanks drafted Chamberlain with the 41st overall pick in June 2006. Those personnel men said Chamberlain's talent was well defined - top-of-the-draft obvious. But as one AL executive said echoing a common view, "There were just too many red flags with health." There was a knee injury in college and that violence at the end of his motion. So Chamberlain tumbled in the draft to the appreciative Yanks.

I didn't hear too many people commenting about his violent motion or talking about those "red flags" when Chamberlain was becoming a sensation, so why do it now with what is a relatively benign diagnosis for an over-the-top pitcher who throws as hard as Chamberlain

does? His motion doesn't look overly stressful to me and we have to remember that the pitcher that Chamberlain is compared to most often----Roger Clemens----had injury problems early in his career before becoming the dominating and durable Rocket.
If anything, I think the Yankees have babied Chamberlain too much. It's one thing to abuse a pitcher and have him get hurt, but to keep him on a reasonable threshold without babying him is better than keeping him in a box to prevent injury. The Yankees couldn't have been more vigilant in their treatment of Chamberlain with their pitch counts, studies and whatever else and he still got hurt. Simply monitoring the pitcher and how he feels while keeping his innings within reason is better than not using him at all because he got hurt anyway. It seems that some of the Joba Rules were created to insulate the team from allegations of overusing the pitcher and that's not something that should be a concern because, as is proven with Chamberlain's trip to the disabled list, it didn't even work.

*I wrote a blog about tempering expectations for the Yankees young pitchers with comparisons to other young and touted pitching prodigies who succeeded and failed after last season----A Brief Step Backwards Toward Sanity 10/25/2007----if anyone's interested.