Bottom line, it was time for Joe to go
The Phillies dismissed one of the highest paid managers in baseball Friday, a World Series winner whose previous gig in the league’s largest media market lasted about twice as long as the usual major league managerial tenure.
As baseball and sports in general remind us too often, staying power for a manager or head coaching chair is a rare blessing.
Joe Girardi is a baseball man. A straightforward, seasoned winner who was a manager of the year in a one-season stay in Florida, a World Champion during his 10 seasons at Yankee Stadium,
a recognized “players’ manager” (but who isn’t now?) brought in to reverse course for the Phillies.
So what happened? Nothing out of the ordinary in baseball, in sports … and in South Philly, that’s for sure.
“When good players play well collectively usually you win more than you lose,” noted newcomer Nick Castellanos said. “We haven’t played up to our potential as a group, as a unit.
“The way I look at it is, it always comes down to the players because we’re the ones who have to play. If we were there playing better, Joe would still have a job. At the end of the day, in baseball, in sports in general … winning fixes everything. And we haven’t won that much, so things start to get shaken up.”
If that was a lesson to anyone, you really couldn’t see it inside the Phillies clubhouse hours after Girardi was sent packing. It was the usual quiet space, with team leaders Bryce Harper and Rhys Hoskins brought out to profess their sorrow and guilt about the manager taking a fall, all the while knowing it’s just baseball business as usual.
No one understands that better than a longtime manager and longtime former player like Girardi himself.
“I can look back on this week when we were, I don’t know, 3-7?” Girardi said on a satellite radio show after leaving Citizens Bank Park with his walking papers. “I think realistically
we probably should have been 7-3. Now, that’s going to fall on me because we weren’t. I understand that, and I just pray that they get better, that they get to the playoffs.”
Girardi gave way Friday to a guy in Rob Thomson who is getting his first chance as a big league manager at 58 years old, replacing the guy he worked next to for many years in New York and here. A guy who was his boss, and his friend, and is now his great supporter.
“I would argue he’s the best coach I’ve ever been around,” Girardi said of Thomson. “He’s more prepared than any coach I’ve ever been around. He has great baseball sense. Like, I think he deserved a chance a long time ago. I hope he turns this around, and runs this team to the playoffs, and they do great. And that he continues as a manager. I love the guy to death. I could almost argue that every win (in Girardi’s career), except the wins with the Florida Marlins, Rob Thomson has had a hand in my life. A huge hand. … I’m pulling for this guy because I believed he deserved an opportunity a long time ago.”
The right-hand man replaces the right manager who suddenly wasn’t the right one any longer. Safe to say that this isn’t a unique theme in baseball, leaving one to wonder how valuable a manager is in the first place.
“Look, I guess it’s just part of the business, right?” Hoskins said. “(Thomson) addressed us today and there’s some bittersweet to it, right? (Girardi) is a man that’s cared about us in here as a group, individually we’ve gone to war with him, he’s been here for the last couple of years, developed relationships. And at the end of the day it’s about winning baseball games and we didn’t do enough of that.”
“As a team, there’s blame on us as well,” Harper said. “There’s not just blame on Joe. We haven’t played to the best of our ability. We haven’t done the things to be the team that we should be.”
The ax fell via an early morning call from team president Dave Dombrowski to Girardi, “but he didn’t answer right away,” Dombrowski said. “He was out running some errands with his kids … I sent him a text, asked him if he could come over here. … It was pretty quick. He said, ‘I get it. The club has underperformed. I’ve been through this before, I understand how it goes.’
“But when you hear that news at first you’re not exactly in bright spirits.”
Supposedly, several long conversations with other staff members — and majority owner John Middleton — cheered up Girardi as he set about packing up his office. “I think by the end he was in a much more relieved state,” Dombrowski said. “The pressure was off his back at that time.”
That pressure had grown during a disastrous May in which lack of timely hitting, poor fielding and shaky bullpen outings conspired to undercut any progress the Phillies tried to make, and any progress Girardi tried to make with them. You know, much the same way as has happened for the last several years. Girardi had been brought here to shift the atmosphere, alter the losing experience, CHANGE THE CULTURE … but what everyone from ownership to fan may or may not realize is that the guy in charge can only change so much.
“I think Joe busted his tail on a day-in and dayout basis,” Dombrowski said. “I just think a different voice is needed. I think that (Thomson) is a different voice and viewed in a different way with the players.”
And if this move runs the usual course, that no matter how much of a voice Thomson has, it won’t be loud enough to change much, then there will be another offseason of speculating and interviewing ahead for the next Phillies manager, the next difference maker, the next culture changer.
Good luck with that.