Joe Girardi Should Not Be Casualty of Yankees’ Disappointing Season
September 11, 2014 · Anthony Witrado · Jump to comments
Article Source: Bleacher Report - New York Yankees
When a man is tasked with driving someone else’s car across the country with four slow leaks in its tires, it is not that man’s fault when the car flattens halfway through the journey.
Joe Girardi is in a similar situation.
The New York Yankees are technically still breathing, and that alone shows the kind of job Girardi has done with this club, crippled by injuries, aging players and unrealistic expectations. In almost a repeat of last season, after which the team gave Girardi a four-year extension to remain as manager, the Yankees are on the verge of being eliminated from the American League wild-card race for a second consecutive year and the third time in Girardi’s seven seasons.
As one might imagine, that doesn’t sit well with some, especially those with a Twitter voice:
FIRE JOE GIRARDI!
— LeslieinFortLee (@DisgustedNYer) September 12, 2014
But these aren’t The Boss’ Yankees. The team is run by a levelheaded general manager in Brian Cashman and an owner in Hal Steinbrenner who would rather give due process than fire managers on a whim as his father, George, would.
And when the autopsy comes back on this team in the autumn, the manager won’t be the cause of death.
For the cause, just check the season scoreboard, the one that tells you why this team is where it is—75-69, 10.5 games out of the AL East lead and four out of the second wild-card spot with 18 games remaining.
The team’s two best pitchers, CC Sabathia and Masahiro Tanaka, have made only 26 starts between them this season, and Sabathia had a 5.28 ERA in his eight outings. Michael Pineda has made just 10 starts and Ivan Nova just four.
In September alone the Yankees have lost Brett Gardner, Martin Prado and Carlos Beltran to injuries, which was their entire outfield on certain days. Gardner and Prado have been Girardi’s best hitters since Aug. 1. Add them to Mark Teixeira’s buffet of ailments all season, and the lineup has been a patchwork since April.
There is also the fact that Robinson Cano, the team’s most valuable player in three of the previous four seasons, is wearing a Seattle Mariners uniform this year. It was not Girardi who was unwilling to commit the years and money it took to re-sign Cano, who is now a critical piece to the Mariners’ playoff hopes.
And while Cano’s overall contract was not a wise one for the Yankees to commit to, we are talking about this year’s shortcomings.
“It’s just a different thought process, is what it is,” Girardi told Kevin Davidoff of the New York Post in July, although the words hold true two months later. “You’re not exactly sure what you’re going to have any given week, in a sense. So it’s just kind of different, in a sense.
“You have a lot of people walk in and out of the doors. Your team is not consistent. And the hardest thing about that is not necessarily making the lineup every day. But you just don’t know some of the signs that you’ve learned when you’re around people for a long time.”
When you consider this, Girardi’s contract should absolutely not be terminated. The fact that his team is 75-69 when its Pythagorean record should be 69-74 entering Thursday is an accomplishment in itself. If Manager of the Year voting was done like MVP voting—10 places rather than only one choice—Girardi has a case to be in the AL’s top five.
Any manager will have his flaws, and fans, scouts and executives can gripe about how he writes out his lineup or manages his bullpen, but 30 managers in the league undergo those criticisms daily. The bottom line is that this team missing the playoffs for a second straight year is not Girardi’s doing.
If anyone should take the fall, it should be the man who built the aging, injury-prone roster. But according to Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com, the Yankees plan to offer Cashman a new contract after the season, and his second-half acquisitions of Prado, Chase Headley and Brandon McCarthy have impressed enough that Steinbrenner doesn’t seem to blame Cashman for another disappointing summer.
That is fine. If ownership still has faith in Cashman, more power to them. But if he doesn’t go, no one else should either. Mainly, Girardi.
All things considered, he has done a steady job in a frustrating situation. This Yankees regime understands how to weigh options, accurately assess performance and, sometimes most importantly, how not to overreact.
All of that adds up to Girardi having deserved job security.
Anthony Witrado covers Major League Baseball for Bleacher Report. He spent the previous three seasons as the national baseball columnist at Sporting News, and four years before that as the Brewers‘ beat writer for The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Follow Anthony on Twitter @awitrado and talk baseball here.
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