To paraphrase Mel Brooks, Joba Chamberlain is just a pawn in the game of life, buffeted from the rotation to the bullpen and back — a victim of some of baseball’s most cherished idiocies. Simply put, having Chamberlain in the rotation is a no-brainer, one of the few ways the Yankees have within their power of lowering the disastrously high ERA of their starting rotation, currently third-worst in the American League. Worrying about the effect his removal from the bullpen will have on the eighth inning is tantamount to the captain of the Titanic wondering if the rising water will spoil the upholstery in the dining room.

One of the strangest ideas to have taken hold of baseball during the last few decades is that one inning is somehow more important than the others. Losing a game in the eighth or ninth inning is a disaster, but losing one in the first inning, or for that matter the third or the fifth, is more acceptable. In fact, the crisis point of a game may come in any inning, particularly in the first frame. There are fewer comebacks in baseball than is commonly thought; the team that scores first very often wins. Yet, if the home team gives up a run in the top of the first and goes on to lose the game 1-0, the losing manager says, “You’ve just got to tip your hat.” If the team loses the same 1-0 game because of a solo home run in the ninth, the manager spends the postgame talking about how his team will have to put this devastating, crushing loss behind them.

In fact, in 2007, if the home team opened the bottom of the first with no score, they went on to win 60% of the time. However, if they went to the bottom of the first down 1-0, they lost 51% of the time. If they went to the bottom of the first down 2-0, they lost 61% of the time. Similarly, if the visiting team gave up a single run in the bottom of the first inning, they went on to lose nearly two-thirds of the time. The basic lesson is that you can’t protect leads you don’t have, and if your starting pitcher gets whacked about early, it is unlikely that you will ever have a lead to protect.

The Yankees have played many games this season where they never had the lead because their starting pitcher was blasted, so their wonderful setup/closer tandem of Chamberlain and Mariano Rivera were reduced to spectatorship, becoming just as valuable as the average fat guy in the third row of the bleachers, who didn’t pitch either. Now, if the Yankees’ rotation was stacked from one through five with potential Cy Young award winners, this would be no big deal, because Chamberlain’s ability to start would be redundant, and his ability to blow batters away out of the pen would be his best usage by the team. If, however, the starters are not that good — and they’re not — and Chamberlain has the ability to be a better-than-average starter, which, based on available evidence, he does, then leaving him in the pen is a self-defeating luxury. It’s like having to choose between driving your Hummer and your Prius to work with the price of gas at $4 a gallon, and taking the Hummer because you want the Prius to be available when gas goes to $8. Instead of dealing in contingency planning, the Yankees need to face the reality of their current situation, which is that bad starting pitching is taking them out of too many games.

As for the eighth inning, the Yankees may blow some leads once Chamberlain moves out of the pen, particularly if they keep relying on the highly unreliable Kyle Farnsworth to fill the vacancy. Yet, even with Farnsworth, the Yankees will lose comparatively few leads. Again turning to last year’s full season results, we see that when the home team exited the seventh inning with a one-run lead, it won 79% of the time. It won 92% of the time with a two-run lead, and 97% of the time with a three-run lead. The numbers for the visiting team are not dissimilar. Those results represent all teams — those with Chamberlain-level setup men and those without. It’s nice to have greatness available to you in the eighth inning (or, for that matter, the ninth), but you don’t need it. You just require mere competence.

So ignore the pundits, the talk show hosts, and their callers, who will beat their breasts because the Yankees risk depleting their bullpen. The bullpen is irrelevant if you’re losing games from the outset, and risk is a relative thing when your team is in last place and miles from even the wild card — the Yankees can’t go any lower. The only real risk is in standing pat and wasting a potentially talented starter because of a backward set of priorities.

Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for yesnetwork.com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.