Girardi is studying up as Phils sit idle

Joe Girardi hasn’t been sitting around like a vacationer the past week while Major League Baseball has put his team on hiatus.

A communicator inside the dugout and out, Girardi has plenty of experience as a local and national baseball broadcaster in various stints between managing jobs. He probably didn’t expect to find himself doing that during his first season as a Phillies manager, though.

“It is strange,” Girardi said during a video chat late Saturday afternoon. “It feels like I’m not managing. It feels like I’m a broadcaster, almost, because I’m watching games and taking notes like I did as a broadcaster.”

Girardi has been doing a lot of that at home in the past week, watching other MLB teams play while getting daily coronavirus tests and doing what he can to prepare for whenever his team would play again.

Despite several stops and starts and changing media reports and essentially nothing issued officially by a league office to alleviate MLB’s ongoing case of schedule chaos, Girardi made it clear that the Phillies are indeed going to play the New York Yankees this week in a series of four games that will serve as makeups

for games lost after so many Miami Marlins tested positive for the virus earlier in the week.

The number of infected Marlins would reach 19 (17 players, 2 coaches) and the club quarantined in a Philadelphia hotel all week. Meanwhile, under presumption of exposure, the Phillies had to cancel a pair of two-game series with the Yankees (home and away), then a series with Toronto which originally was scheduled to be a road series but was moved to Citizens Bank Park.

And then it was banged, too.

To make matters much worse, the Phillies had two staff members test positive during their shutdown, which moved the bosses to tell the players to self-quarantine for two days. Then word came down afterward that they were false-positive results.

Thanks anyway!

“I know one thing,” Girardi said, “I would rather have a false positive than a false negative. Because if we have a false negative we’ve seen what happens once it gets inside a clubhouse. I like that we’re cautious. I think that’s the way we have to be, because we jeopardize too many individuals, and not just individuals inside the clubhouse, but extended family members of individuals.”

Either way, those Yankees games are now scheduled to be made up over four consecutive days, all at Yankee Stadium, starting Monday.

For now they are, anyway.

And Girardi, rather than go back to his old MLB analysts chair to tell the viewing audience all the new things he’s learned by watching games, is hoping he can actually put his research to better use.

First though, he has to figure out how to prepare players who were idle for a week to play a perennially powerful club at its own ... empty ballpark.

“I think we’re more concerned about just Monday, right?” Girardi said. “Can we just get through Monday? Then you’ve got a hurricane coming, right? So we have a lot more things to worry about than whether we’re getting 57 games in, in 56 days. We’ve got to worry about games one, two, three and four here (this week), with what we’ve got going on.”

Oh yeah, the weather. Whatever that named storm that begins with an I is, it might make it difficult for the Phillies and Yankees to get games in, especially on Tuesday, should the I storm slide a bit inland.

And, as Girardi pointed out, the Phillies still have 57 games to play and the MLB regular season is slated to finish in 56 days. But MLB did adopt that ridiculous seven-inning doubleheader rule, which should make it easier for makeup games.

“Only time will tell,” Girardi said when asked about the ridiculously daunting schedule that lies ahead. “I believe players have the ability to rise to the occasion all the time and do extraordinary things . ... I know we have 57 games left and I think there’s 56 days left in the season. I don’t know how that’s going to play out. But it seems the landscape of our game is changing every week and we’re having to overcome some hurdles. So we’re not in this alone and I trust that Baseball will do the right thing.”

He might find some dissenting opinions on that point.

Let’s go to Twitter for that engaging tweet star Andrew McCutchen, who in the midst of entertaining his followers Thursday paused for a serious moment and hit the send button on this:

“All jokes aside... this really sucks.”

“They’re frustrated that they’re not playing right now, and they’re not blaming anybody,” Girardi said of his players. “They want to play because that’s what we do and I think our players are handling this great.”