Girardi’s job has evolved into waiting game
PHILADELPHIA » The Phillies had just lost another extra-inning game in the usual bullpen-breakdown fashion Tuesday night, and there would be Joe Girardi displaying every latenight look of a beaten man.
Immediately plopping his left elbow on the table for the purposes of resting his chin, he exhaled and looked around the press room at Citizens Bank Park, searching for something, anything to explain what he had been seeing.
“I’m not going to abuse people,” he said. “I refuse to do that.”
By this point in his third and final season as the manager of a team that deserves better, there was no reason. Girardi had enough time to set the rules, the mood and the expectations, yet still 32-year-old Jeurys Familia would forget to cover first base and allow a San Francisco rally to mushroom. The time has passed for Girardi to act like it all matters, but that would have required him to manage that way instead of constantly choosing to rest players in important games in the warped belief that somehow there would be more important games later.
At this point, that’s all Girardi has left in his lame-duck season: The hope that it will all improve. A 6-5 victory over San Francisco that snipped a five-game losing streak Wednesday gave a few hints that it could, including the rarity of responsible relief pitching.
“I think we needed a win before today,” Girardi said. “But this was a great way to go into an off day. I mean, these guys have been grinding. We get an off-day Thursday and an off-day Monday and hopefully that refreshes our guys. But I think we really needed a win.”
They did, and so did their manager, who has done so little to show he deserves a contract extension.
It wasn’t a bad idea for John Middleton to channel his inner CEO and fire Gabe Kapler, replacing him with a manager with a world championship already on his yellow sheet. Girardi was a proven winner, once a National League Manager of the Year, a good communicator who would command the clubhouse attention that Kapler never concocted, a bigcity personality with a big-city swagger. Few questioned the hiring, but if they did, it was buffered by one reasonable question: After two years away from baseball and softened by the life of a TV analyst, did he still have the competitive drive to lift the Phillies to their first postseason since 2011?
Girardi never had a fair chance to show that, as his first spring-training was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic, and what ensued was a cockamamie mini-season of blended divisions, idiotic rules and fans made out of vinyl. By his second season, some of the odd rules were still in place. By the third, there was a work stoppage, a truncated spring training and his own expiring contract.
But isn’t that why a team will pay a manager $3 million a year, to deal with the odd situation, not the easy one?
Though he lugs around a binder of secret baseball codes — a habit he
had in New York, when he was winning titles with the Yankees — Girardi chronically has the wrong relief pitchers in the wrong games at the wrong times. His touch with starting pitching has been disturbing, as he rarely succeeds whether he decides to lift one early or keep one in late. Twice late in recent losses, he chose to lift one of the most dangerous bashers of the era, Nick Castellanos, for Roman Quinn, only to be sitting there as if stunned when Castellanos’ lineup turn came around again.
“I think that with the coaching as a whole, it’s a very tough situation to be in because at the end of
the day we’re the players,” Kyle Schwarber said before providing the gamewinning homer Wednesday. “We’re the the ones who are out there playing in the games. We’re going to win or lose the games, right? That’s how it is. I try to keep my head out of that but I don’t think that anyone should be putting any blame on any other person, thing or whatever it is. This is a team, right? We’re all a team. This is a big collective unit. This isn’t a oneperson show.”
As exhausted as Girardi appeared after a five-hour loss Tuesday, he was on the field four hours before game time on a hot Wednesday afternoon,
doing some work, aware of the calendar and the eternal baseball truth that streaks eventually will break both ways. By then, he’d already known that Jean Segura would be lost for most of the season with a broken finger. Soon after, he would be told Bryce Harper was clocking out with an ouchy forearm.
Still, he would remain optimistic.
“June has to be better,” he had said around midnight Tuesday. “Right?”
One game into the month, he already looked refreshed.