Three summers ago, Joba Chamberlain was playing baseball for his Lincoln Legion team and waged in a scoreless duel with soon-to-be University of Nebraska teammate Johnny Dorn.

“The next morning is when I got a call from Rob Childress,” Bill Fagler, Chamberlain’s coach at Lincoln Northeast, said Tuesday of the Huskers’ former pitching coach. “He said ‘When do you think the next time Joba will pitch again?’ ”

If Childress wants to inquire about that now, he’ll have to call New York — and ask for Yankees manager Joe Torre.

As expected, the club, working to shore up an unstable bullpen, activated the blazing righthander from Lincoln before their Tuesday night game at Toronto. Chamberlain then threw two scoreless innings in his major-league debut as the Yankees picked up a 9-2 victory in a game started by seven-time Cy Young Award winner Roger Clemens.

Having gone nearly 80 years without producing a major-league player, Lincoln now has two natives in the ‘bigs’ — Chamberlain and Kansas City Royals third baseman Alex Gordon, who along with Chamberlain carried NU to the 2005 College World Series and helped produce the school’s only victory in the event.

Chamberlain, just 21 and in his first professional season, becomes the first Lincolnite to pitch in the majors since Fred Beebe, who won 62 games from 1906-16.

“Very exciting and, let’s say, unexpected,” Fagler said.

You see, Chamberlain’s meteoric rise to the most storied franchise in baseball comes a mere three seasons after he was a sub-.500 pitcher for NCAA Division II Nebraska-Kearney.

“I had talked to some Division II schools and some junior colleges, and I couldn’t get anybody 100 percent interested in him until he went to one of these showcases the first of August (2003) at the University,” said Fagler, now Nebraska Wesleyan’s coach. “It was run when everybody was at the state legion tournaments, so he went to that on his own, and Kearney saw him there.

“… He got a lot of help from Rob Childress, (but) I think Kearney helped him a lot, making him believe he could do well.”

In his two seasons at Nebraska, Chamberlain made 32 appearances, all as a starter. In 2005, he went 10-2 and earned All-America honors, then battled triceps tendinitis early in the 2006 season and finished 6-5.

The Yankees still selected him with the 41st pick of the draft and after pitching in the Hawaiian Winter League he began the 2007 season at Class-A Tampa.

Success there led to promotions to Double-A Trenton and Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, with a spot in the All-Star Futures Game coming in between. When New York called him up, Chamberlain was a combined 9-2 with a 2.45 ERA that included 135 strikeouts in 881/3 innings.

Projected as a starter, possibly next season, Chamberlain’s current role will be to help a bullpen that has 15 blown saves — the most of any team in the American League East Division — as the Yankees make a push for another postseason appearance.

In his three minor-league relief appearances, Chamberlain allowed just one hit over four innings and struck out 10 of the 12 batters he faced.

“It’s one of those things that seemed to be crying out to happen because of what he’s been doing,”  Torre told The Associated Press when asked before Tuesday’s game about Chamberlain’s promotion. “You hear so many positive things about him.

“We just have to make sure we understand how old he is, how much experience he has and just go accordingly from there. At this point I don’t know how we’re going to use him but we’ll get him a taste.

“This is all new for him. This is not something he’s been doing all year. We’ll take it slow.”

New York’s roving pitching instructor Nardi Contreras, who said he thought Chamberlain was “like a man among boys” when he first saw him at Tampa, doesn’t seem worried about how much the Nebraskan can handle.

“His curveball is probably as hard as some guys’ slider in the big leagues,” Contreras said. “He’s very special. He’s altogether different than other guys we’ve brought up.”

Last weekend, when asked by the New York Post’s Steve Serby what he’d like to say to Yankees fans, Chamberlain responded, “I’m gonna wear it on my sleeve. I’m gonna give it everything I got, day in and day out.”

Those are words that Bob Cerv — born on a farm near Weston, where he was raised — hopes serve Chamberlain well.

Cerv, a two-sport star and baseball All-American at Nebraska, was barely a year into the pros in 1951 when the Yankees promoted him to New York.

“Once you’re a Yankee, always a Yankee,” said the 82-year-old, who spent parts of nine seasons in New York during a 12-year career. “I hope (Chamberlain) does well. I hope they aren’t throwing him into the fire.”

Reach Curt McKeever at 473-7441 or cmckeever@journalstar.com.