Girardi moves to help lineup
PHILADELPHIA » is regular leadoff hitter was on the bench. His regular first baseman had the night off. His second baseman was up in the order. His two regular left-handed pinch-hitters were starting.
“I haven’t necessarily changed the lineup,” Joe Girardi said Tuesday, before a game against the San Francisco Giants. “It’s just that I chose to get a couple of guys the day off.”
His batting order, his story. One player’s day off is another player’s opportunity.
One manager’s edited lineup card is another manager’s wail for offensive help.
“It doesn’t mean I won’t change,” Girardi said. “I’m just saying that sometimes when you take some pieces out, you have to juggle some other pieces to make it work.”
Girardi is in his second year of managing the Phillies, a franchise with bigideas ownership, and his team showed up at Citizens Bank Park ranked 23rd in baseball in runs scored. He has a left-fielder who hasn’t hit in years and a spray of centerfielders so offensively inept that researchers halted the archeological dig for anything worse at 1906.
A night earlier, the Phils were shut out, leaving 11 runners on and leaving a socially distanced crowd less than shocked. Another night like that and Milt Thompson was going to be fired again.
So Girardi reacted, sitting leadoff hitter Andrew McCutchen and first baseman Rhys Hoskins, throwing lefthanded-hitting Matt Joyce and Brad Miller in against right-handed Logan Webb and squeezing Jean Segura into the two-hole.
Any lineup can work for one game. Any lineup can be shut out in a given night. But no matter how politely Girardi requested calm, his behavior suggested impatience.
The Phils were on a 13game slide without their starting centerfielder generating a hit, the longest such slump in baseball in at least 115 years. Girardi was asked if Bryce Harper could make sense in center, but the Phillies have $330,000,000 invested in him and are terrified that even giving him regular work in right field is putting dangerous stress on his ouchy back. Odubel Herrera, once accused but not convicted of domestic violence, is a possibility, but the Phillies are not ready to welcome the inevitable sour publicity. Scott Kingery, it is being whispered, is not even hitting at the minor-leaguea-palooza.
Only Dave Dombrowski can solve the centerfield issue. Until a trade is made, it is above Girardi’s head. But as much as the manager tried to muffle his decision Tuesday to sit McCutchen, it was an early indication of where his left-field search is headed. The former MVP is 34 and has a reconstructed knee, was hitting .157 with one home run and had walked 11 times in 62 plate appearances. At least he had a stolen a base, singular.
It’s senseless to expect to win a playoff spot with that kind of production from the leadoff spot. So Girardi plug-and-played Joyce in left, trusting him at the top of the order.
“To me, it’s timing,” Girardi said. “Cutch is a big ‘feel’ guy. And he just hasn’t felt it consistently this year. So I am thinking a day off will help.”
Beats a day on. “There’s a sense of urgency, always, in the game of baseball,” Girardi said. “And there is a lot of ‘What have you done for me lately?’ I get that, because we are in the business of performance on a daily basis. But we’re still talking about 10 percent of the season that he has struggled with. To me, that’s not a lot of time. There are a lot of Hall of Famers that have struggled for 10 percent of a season.”
The NL East is too powerful for 10 percent of a season to be dismissed, or 15, or 20. Girardi managed too long in Yankee Stadium, where urgency-sense oozes from every flat surface. He knows better than to stay too long with something not producing.
“If I ever do decide to ‘change the lineup,’ I would definitely give the players a heads up before it happens,” he said. “But today I just chose to give Cutch and Rhys a day off.”
When true change happens, and it will, it will happen organically, gradually, evolving before too many can notice. It will begin with a day off here, or a lineup twist there. It will begin as it did Tuesday, with a manager making changes and insisting they were not significant.
“We’re just not swinging the bat very well right now,” Girardi said. “Some of it is the pitchers we’ve faced. I don’t think our hitters have kind of hit their stride yet.
“I think there is a lot of frustration around the league from a lot of teams. But we have to turn it around.”
So try new things. If they work, few will remember the old things.
If they don’t work, just pretend they never happened.