The Franciscan monkey

To some, the season is over. Joba's right arm is preordained to be sliced open. Late innings lead will be turned over to Farnsworth. The team will place somewhere between Tampa and Toronto. Cashman will leave at the end of the year.

While recognizing that the furor over Hank's comments is a distortion of reality -- as are the bulk of developments on River Avenue -- moving Chamberlain to the pen will have pretty big ramifications. There are three competing viewpoints on Joba's future.

Those viewpoints are:

a) He should be moved to the rotation immediately;
b) He should be moved to the rotation later this year, as scheduled;
c) He should stay in the bullpen now and forever, because Mariano Rivera excelled as a setup man as a rookie and then became a legendary closer, and the team must recapture this formula if it is ever to succeed again.

Of those three options, which would you guess represents the ravings of lunatic that has paralyzed the city's sports news for the past 24 hours? It takes a particularly deluded person, in this case Mike Francesa, dogged believer in the innate holiness of middle relief, to make Hank Steinbrenner seem innocuous. And yet he manages.

Moving Joba to the rotation now would be a mistake. But keeping in the rotation for life for no other reason than to try to duplicate the career path of Mariano Rivera would be pathological.