Not much short of a perfect game in which he struck out each batter on three pitches would have met the expectations with which Joba Chamberlain was faced last night in his first major league start. Having become the all-but-anointed ace of the Yankees at 22 without ever having done so much as face a batter twice in one game, Chamberlain could not possibly have lived up to his press, and in fact he didn’t, leaving 2.1 innings into last night’s 9-3 loss to the Toronto Blue Jays. It was probably the best thing for him.

If you want an index of why Chamberlain is not yet, and won’t be for some time, the ace so many people badly want him to be, you could do worse than to look at the dry numbers of the first inning of his first start: Thirty-eight pitches, 19 minutes, four 1-0 counts, three 0-1 counts, four walks, two strikeouts, one balk, one hit, one run, one pitch implausibly registered at 101 miles per hour on the Yankee Stadium scoreboard, and a grand total of one well-hit ball. That’s the best and worst of Chamberlain in a line.

For Yankees partisans, the most alarming number is doubtless the 38. With the unhittable phenom limited, as everyone in America knew, to 70 pitches last night, the Blue Jays would have been fools to do anything but try to draw him out, and so they did. Leadoff man Shannon Stewart set the tone by fouling off three pitches en route to drawing a walk in an eight-pitch at bat, and his teammates seemed similarly content to let the rookie work his way off the mound.

This is a sound strategy. It’s easy for pitching coaches and writers to preach the virtues of throwing strikes, especially on the first pitch, and more difficult to do so. Similarly, everyone who’s ever watched a baseball game knows that a starter can’t go out in the first inning trying to punch the ball through the catcher’s mitt, through the umpire, through the backstop, and into the stands, as Chamberlain seemed to be doing last night. A reliever throws as hard as he can because he only has to go an inning or two at a time; for a starter to do so is madness. This is the sort of thing a pitcher can only really learn through experience. When you can throw hard enough to hit 101 mph, even on a pumped-up ballpark gun, it’s very hard not to do so.

Waiting Chamberlain out, as other teams surely will do, is, however, a strategy with obvious downsides. For one thing, much of the benefit of working your way into a hitter’s count is that you will, in theory, eventually get a good pitch to hit. The Blue Jays didn’t. Even with the young pitcher enduring a mildly nightmarish first, he didn’t throw one pitch any Blue Jay was able to pull, despite throwing a few rolling curveballs up to the plate. Aside from a decent Scott Rolen shot through the right side of the infield, no one was able to lay any decent wood on the ball.

There is also always the possibility that the man just might start throwing strikes. In the second inning, he started off both Brad Wilkerson and David Eckstein 0-2, and while Wilkerson was able to battle the count full before flying out, both were dispatched fairly easily. So was Stewart, even though the first three pitches he saw were balls. In this inning, you saw a glimpse of the starter Chamberlain might become, one whose tendency to labor is more than offset by the sheer ferocity of his stuff. There’s a hint of Roger Clemens in Chamberlain’s fastball, frame, and delivery.

In the third, though, he looked far less like the greatest pitcher of all time and far more like a rookie making his first major league start when Marco Scutaro, a flyweight with two home runs on the year, nearly took him out of the yard to the opposite field. By following that up with a four-pitch walk of Alex Rios that left his pitch count at 62, Chamberlain assured the hook from manager Joe Girardi. The stuff he needed to get batters out was left behind somewhere in the first inning, with one of those big, ridiculous fastballs that make a lot more sense coming from a setup man than they do from someone practicing the same art mastered by Greg Maddux and Pedro Martinez.

Should Yankees fans be worried? Not at all. Chamberlain had a chance to learn some valuable lessons last night, as he will in many games to come. If the lessons don’t take, it will just show that he was never cut out to be a starter. If they do, and he begins to show restraint and discipline at all in line with his surpassing talent, he’ll more than live up to expectations one day. Whether he’ll do so this year is an open question, but it’s a fair bet that the days when sitting there with your bat on your shoulder works as a viable strategy against him will soon come to an end.

tmarchman@nysun.com