In a more normal season, Girardi will provide boost

In less than a month, Joe Girardi will drag a red Phillies cap over his crewcut, exhale, turn toward a ballfield in Clearwater and try again to prove what everybody already knows.

His red cleats click-click-clicking, his heart rate just a little up, the morning Florida sun about to make him squint, he will order the Phillies to spring-training order. Eight months later, if all goes as planned, he will ride shotgun in the lead Cadillac of a world-championship parade.

Girardi was mentioning that desire Monday during a conference call that included new relief pitcher Archie Bradley but not old catcher J.T. Realmuto. He was thinking about 2020, the most cockamamie baseball season ever played, and about how it ended for the Phillies, and about what it might have said about the manager. It wasn’t great.

“Any time I am not a part of a World Series winner, I would consider it a frustrating season,” Girardi said. “Not that there weren’t some good things that happened, and that we didn’t have some good days, because I love what I do. It’s enjoyable to come to work every day. But when your mind is on a World Series and you don’t get there, you continue to evaluate everything you did and measure what you did.”

The man was made to manage a 60-game season with Vince Velasquez in the starting rotation and two of the worst bullpens in history, one before the trade deadline and one after. The lineup was intriguing at the beginning, there was some hope for Jake Arrieta, and some young players seemed ready to blossom. But it didn’t happen and the Phillies lost seven of their last eight to blow a chance at the postseason.

In a normal year, the manager would have taken some heat. But flimsy cutouts of fans, it turns out, stay mostly quiet.

It was not a normal year for anyone. But Girardi is on a Hall of Fame arc, the winner of 1,016 games and expectations to inflate that to 1,116 by October. If the Phillies were promising last season, their talent had less to do with it than John Middleton’s successful recruiting of the most appealing manager on the market. That he would be expected to make a difference wasn’t just the plan.

It was the deal. So when Girardi’s first Phillies collapsed, there were wrinkled stares, the fans having expected better than nightly bullpen follies and an avalanche of disappointment.

But Girardi has achieved enough to not be judged by a season of seven-inning games, multiple doubleheaders, innings beginning with runners on base, insane virus protocols, a geographically-limited schedule and 102 cancelled games. Doug Pederson lost his job for doing a rotten job with the Eagles, and the NFL season was a little sideways, too. But the rules of the game weren’t changed. Brett Brown was fired by the 76ers. But the NBA playoff games, of which Brown couldn’t win one, were still 48 minutes long, and their overtimes did not begin with a slamdunk contest.

That was something close to the baseball that Girardi was asked to manage last season. But it wasn’t baseball. The Phillies are invested in what he can do over 162 games, each one scheduled for nine innings. He deserves that chance.

“As far as the rule changes, I really didn’t have a problem adapting to those,” Girardi said. “I thought some of them were somewhat beneficial to us. So it didn’t bother me.”

Girardi is a class manager, a communicator, a survivor in the New York media market, a noted handler of pitchers and complex situations as a former big-league catcher. So he was not going to whine that he had too many scheduled 14-inning doubleheaders last summer. Yet because of the way the situation has unfolded, the Phillies have chosen, or have been backed into, navigating the deep NL East not necessarily with all of the best players, yet certainly with the most glittering managerial team.

Last year, Middleton went deep into his stash to finance Girardi. This offseason, he went the extra buck for Dave Dombrowski. The two have combined to win three World Series with their wits, not their hits.

“I’m excited to get back to Philadelphia and enjoy Philadelphia the way it was supposed to be enjoyed as a baseball town,”

Girardi said. “Without having the fans there, it was different. Without being able to enjoy the great city of Philadelphia, it was different. So I am really excited about getting back there and having the opportunity to do that.”

Philadelphia is a phenomenal baseball town, as Girardi knows. That, along with Middleton’s checkwriting pen, was a major reason why he chose to return to managing. The same goes for Dombrowski.

So give them a real baseball season. Give them some fans in the stands, some West Coast trips and a more reasonable trade deadline. Don’t slug them with mini-games or lateinning carnival gimmicks.

In less than a month, the Phillies will gather, and Girardi will go to work. Dombrowski will, too.

Given a roster with Bryce Harper, Aaron Nola, Alec Bohm, an improved bullpen and very likely Realmuto, it is a think tank that will succeed.