Major League Baseball in the 21st century may be the most ethnically diverse of all major sports, with some current rosters looking like a veritable United Nations. The New York Yankees alone field players from Japan, Taiwan, Puerto Rico, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, as well as players of mixed ancestry such as white and African-American and white and Thai. Curiously, one ethnic group is mostly unrepresented, Americans Indians. Now, 22-year-old Justin Chamberlain of Lincoln, Neb., is changing that in a high-profile way.
If you’ve been following baseball since early August, you don’t know him as Justin, and by the time you read this it’s likely no one will ever call him that again. To Yankee fans, Nebraskans and an increasing number of awestruck American League hitters, the name is “Joba” — pronounced Jah-buh, like the character from Star Wars, Jabba the Hut. Those who have seen his phenomenal fastball in person have dubbed him “Joba the Heat.”
The name Joba came from a young relative on the Winnebago Indian Reservation in northeastern Nebraska who couldn’t say Justin. It stuck, and Joba is currently in the process of making it his legal name. “People pronounce it wrong all the time,” he says with a shrug. “They still say ‘Joe-ba.’ ” Not his teammates and their followers, to whom Joba represents perhaps the last chance for the desperate Yankees in the postseason. full story
