Awful:

Will Carroll (@injuryexpert)6/9/11 4:40 PM Joba Chamberlain has “near complete tear” of UCL. Tommy John surgery coming.

What good did the “Joba Rules” of the last few years do? What good did the Hughes Rules, or the Ian Kennedy do, for that matter?

I won’t say this has made a Nolan Ryan out of me just yet. In fact, all the studies I’ve seen suggest that pitch counts matters way more than innings pitched or four- versus five-man rotations when it comes to susceptibility to injury. My point is that the Yankees gave up on (how many?) innings over the last few years from talented starters in a naive (and I might also add decidedly liberal) hope that they could engineer the future with just enough science and just enough regulation. But can anyone honestly say, if you went back in time three years and told the Yankees front office that the two studs they were handling with kid gloves were going to fall apart the second you took the gloves off — can anyone honestly say that the right reaction to that foreknowledge would have been more restrictions?

I know that contract sizes and the scale of revenue involved in the game have made this impossible, but maybe they should have just let these kids play. Sic transit gloria.