The Yankees announced the 2008 Joba Rules yesterday. This time there’s just one: Thou shalt not start (for the time being). The big pitcher will be temporarily locked out of the starting rotation and will go back to protecting leads for Mariano Rivera until the time comes when the Yankees more desperately need a starter.

With Chien-Ming Wang, Andy Pettitte, Mike Mussina, Phil Hughes, and Ian Kennedy lined up for the starting rotation and none of the throw-their-names-in-a-hat, unpedigreed bullpen candidates having distinguished themselves to date, the Yankees applied the Joba-patch to where it was most needed. Later, as the pitching staff evolves, they may be forced to tear that band-aid off of the bullpen and apply it to the starting rotation.

This year, the Yankees have already shown some of the confusion that can result when a team is working with conflicting imperatives. Priority no. 1 has been to use the young pitchers. Priority no. 2 is to use them, but not break them. Sadly, those priorities don’t easily coexist. If you use a pitcher, eventually he is going to break. This is true even if you use him very gingerly. Once you take the toy out of the box, it is no longer in mint condition. The odometer inexorably rolls up. Some pitchers don’t break down until 30,000 miles, some not until 50,000. Others break down at mile 1, 5, or 10. A team can minimize stressors like high pitch counts, tortured mechanics, appearances in bad weather, and not returning starters to games after hour-long rain delays (are you listening, Joe Girardi?), but they cannot eliminate the most basic stressor of all, which is the act of pitching.

The Yankees will do their best to work with the one variable most in their control, the amount of work the young pitchers do. This posture creates another problem, because the innings not thrown by Phil Hughes or Ian Kennedy don’t just disappear — the Yankees still have to pitch them — and so a larger workload gets thrown back on the bullpen. Mariano Rivera can only pitch about 70 of the more than 500 innings the team’s relievers will have to carry, which in turn means that pitchers like Kyle Farnsworth, LaTroy Hawkins, Billy Traber (assuming he makes the team as a lefty spot-reliever), and whoever else ultimately rounds out the bullpen will have to do more than is safe for them to do. In this context, “safe” does not mean “healthy,” as it does for the young starters, but rather “prudent,” as in, “the more you see of them, the greater the chances that a 5–3 seventh inning lead will turn into a 6–5 loss.”

It is always possible that the Yankees will unearth the odd gem amid the no-names now auditioning for relief roles, but one should never assume that these things will work out; rather, the wise man expects the worst of any bullpen and reserves the right to be pleasantly surprised if, as the old song goes, the team finds a million-dollar baby in the five and ten cents store.

As spring rolled on and these contradictory impulses began to coalesce around Chamberlain, it became clear that what the Yankees were missing was a particular kind of pitcher: the long man. It’s not their fault they didn’t have a long man, because with expansion, the specialization of relievers, and the general scarcity of starting pitchers, the long man was hunted out of existence some years ago, along with his closely related cousin, the swing man. The long man worked 90 or 100 innings a year, rarely in save situations. His job was not to retire a single lefty and hit the showers, or throw a sidearm sinker to a right-handed batter and induce a double play, but simply to kill the clock, to absorb as many innings as he could on nights when the starter had to retire early. This one role player would absorb a lot of punishment so that the rest of the staff didn’t have to.

In the old days — old meaning less than 20 years ago — when starting pitchers threw more innings, the long man allowed the team to hold the reliever corps to 10 pitchers. Today, as starting and relief staffs slowly are undergoing a long, slow crawl toward the convergence of their workloads (the former already throw fewer innings every year, the latter ever more), they could allow a team frightened of burning out its young starters to avoid carrying a 13th reliever and actually maintain a bench player or two.

Ironically, in moving Chamberlain to the pen, the Yankees said that they have removed last year’s restrictions on pitching him for multiple innings. If Girardi uses him as a traditional long man, at least two frames at a time, rather than as a pure eighth-inning reliever, the Yankees will soak up the innings being withheld from Hughes and Kennedy. If not, they will have added quality to the pen, but not depth. And Joba still might break. They all might. That’s what pitchers do.

Mr. Goldman is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel