Quite the journey
If Girardi walks away after playoff run, it will end impressive tenure
Joe Girardi’s future is uncertain with his contract expiring, but going back to the World Series eight years later would be a fitting end for him in pinstripes.
HOUSTON — Eight years. That’s two presidential terms. Five “Fast and Furious” movies. Forty half-lives of 80 socialmedia apps that have come and gone.
On the baseball matrix, where the Cubs took 108 years to win a title and the Astros lean on the ropes in Year 56, eight years can feel less drastic, like something between a brief nap and an extended hot yoga class. Yet with eight years as a determinant, the Yankees and Joe Girardi sit one win away from some pretty special company.
If the Yankees can eliminate the Astros in this American League Championship Series with a win in either Friday night’s Game 6 or Saturday night’s Game 7, both at Minute Maid Park, then Girardi would record his second American League pennant as a skipper, with his first coming in 2009.
It would elevate Girardi to some rare air. And, if he does step down after his contract expires in concurrence with the end of this run, it would be a hell of a way to go.
“It has been a long time, really, since we got to this point,” Girardi said Thursday on a conference call. “We haven’t been to the American League championship in a while [since 2012]. And with a completely new roster, it does mean a lot.”
Actually, three current Yankees — Brett Gardner, David Robertson and CC Sabathia — played for the 2009 champions; Robertson left for the White Sox after 2014 and returned this season in a July trade. If they can join forces with the 22 relative newcomers on the team to finish off Houston, Girardi would become the first manager since the Braves’ Bobby Cox to win at least two pennants eight or more years apart with the same team. Cox took the Braves to the World Series in 1991, 1992, 1995, 1996 and 1999, winning it all in ’95. The last manager to reach such success over a longer span was Tommy Lasorda, who won his first Dodgers pennant in 1977 and his last in 1988 and also reached the finals in 1978 and 1981.
You naturally rank Cox and Lasorda, Hall of Famers, above Girardi. Yet if Girardi’s Yankees can qualify for the Fall Classic, that would reflect very well on Girardi’s staying power. Shoot, in a perverse way, Girardi’s ability to keep his job despite a paucity of pennants reflects on his ability to click with his bosses and maintain the respect of his players even as the Yankees endured the retirement of their Core Four and a drastic farm-system drought. Girardi kept some pretty mediocre teams in contention until the schedule’s final week.
This year’s blooming of that farm system has served as the payoff for enduring all of the fading veterans and low-ceiling journeymen. “This is a special year,” Girardi said, “and it just seems to get better and better as the year hhas [gone] on.”
After 2013, his last season with aan expiring contract, Girardi n negotiated a four-year extension with the idea that it would keep him on the job for 10 years, a nice, round number. Given how much he puts into the job and how much he prioritizes his family, it would not be a stunner if the 53-year-old decides that 10 is enough for this grueling gig and he takes it easy for a year or two before planning hhis next move.
It would be awfully sweet for G Girardi to leave on such a high, with his team coming back from 0-2 deficits in first the AL Division Series against the Indians — and his horrible decision to not challenge a bad call in Game 2 — and tthen the ALCS with the Astros, history in its own right as no team has done this twice in the same p postseason.
He of course won’t entertain that thought publicly, not with more work to be done. Eight years have passed since Girardi has been at this brink, and he won’t get caught looking ahead or back now. Even if the rest of us can’t help doing so.