Bill Madden: Joe Girardi couldn’t manage his way out of the mess in Philly
For two former Yankee managers, the month of May wrought contrasting fortunes, leaving Buck Showalter sitting pretty in first place with the largest lead on June 1 of any Met team in history — at the same time, Joe Girardi’s seat got hotter and hotter until Friday when he was relieved of his job in Philly, very likely ending his career.
Two old school managers who have gone in vastly different directions.
Besides both having managed the Yankees, Showalter and Girardi, in their later years, met similar resistance in their hopes of remaining in the game, each of them passed up numerous times by some of the same teams. Showalter, one of the runners-up to Girardi for the Phillies job in 2020. is so far making good in what is most probably his own last stop on the manager merry-go-round. His Mets players clearly love playing for him and there is no question about a major culture change having come over Citi Field. One reason his players are enjoying playing for him — and performing accordingly — is because he doesn’t complicate things, and with his “next man up” philosophy never allows their minds to stray beyond the game at hand.
As the Mets players have discovered, Showalter thrives on the daily give-and-take, challenging them on strategy moves, rules and situations, all in the pretext of keeping them in the game. It especially worked for him in Baltimore where player after player, from Adam Jones to J.J. Hardy to Nick Markakis, would attest that while they might be out-played in a game, at least they knew they would not be out-managed.
On the other hand, Girardi has a whole different — stoic — persona. When he was fired by the Yankees in 2017 after 10 years as their manager, for lack of any logical reason it was hinted that Brian Cashman felt there’d been a failure to communicate on Girardi’s part with the Yankee players. If so, stoic, rigid and sometimes icy as he might be, that wasn’t what got him fired by the Phillies. What got him fired in Philadelphia was (1) the major league’s worst defense which was compounded by Bryce Harper’s torn UCL in his right elbow that has prevented him from playing right field, and (2) a too often ineffective bullpen which has the highest walks-per-nine innings ratio in the majors and the overall 20th worst ERA.
Those were the two prime reasons for the Phillies’ 10-19 free fall in May that dropped them to 22-29, 12 games behind Showalter’s Mets despite an overall plus-1 run differential. Granted there were some questionable tactical moves on Girardi’s part in May that were said to have led to a loss of confidence within the clubhouse and the front office. But Girardi is a good person and a sound, always well-prepared baseball man. The hard, cold facts are the Phillies are simply not a well-constructed ballclub, and the analytics-driven previous administration before current GM Dave Dombrowski did a terrible job of drafting and player development, forcing owner John Middleton to invest heavily in free agency and go over the competitive balance tax threshold for the first time with the fourth highest ($233,209,325) payroll in the majors.
It was heartening to see Dombrowski turn the managership over to Robbie Thomson, who toiled for nine years as a coach and spring training coordinator for the Yankees before joining Girardi in Philly. He’s obviously paid his dues. Whether he is able to manage the Phillies beyond his interim period this season is another question. The defense can’t be fixed, especially with second baseman Jean Segura, one of their better defenders, now out for 12 weeks with a broken finger, and it would be foolhardy on Dombrowski’s part to sacrifice any of the few prospects the Phillies have for stopgap help in the bullpen.
As it is, Dombrowski probably would have been well advised to pass on either the four years/$79 million he spent on Kyle Schwarber or the five years/$100 million on Nick Castellanos and instead used it on a couple of relievers and some defensive help. The sight of Schwarber in left and Castellanos in place of Harper in right — two DHs masquerading as outfielders — has not been a pretty one for the angry fans in Philly. But at least that’s not Girardi’s problem anymore.
IT’S A MADD, MADD WORLD
New Baseball Book of the Week: Leave it to my friend Bob Ryan, a lifelong baseball junkie (and purist) — who somehow got sidetracked at the Boston Globe and went on to become the pre-eminent pro basketball writer in the country — to pen one of the neatest and most unique books on his one true love — “In Scoring Position: 40 Years of a Baseball Love Affair” with Bill Chuck (Triumph). As Ryan says in the forward, he learned how to score at a young age and began keeping score at games in earnest when he joined the Globe in the ‘70s and got his first Baseball Writers Association scorebook. What followed was over 1,400 box scores, meticulously kept in voluminous BBWAA scorebooks over the years — from which Ryan chose about 150 to re-visit in this book with the help of Chuck, the noted baseball statistician.
“Wherever I’d go, I always carried my scorebook,” Ryan said, “because you never knew when a baseball game might break out.” Case in point: Sept. 19, 1986, Anaheim, Calif., Ryan had been assigned by the Globe to travel with the Angels, who had clinched the AL West title, and gather material on them for the paper’s forthcoming preview of ALCS against the Red Sox. On this particular night, the White Sox’s Joe Cowley happened to pitch what may have been the sloppiest no-hitter in baseball history in which he threw 69 strikes and 69 balls, walking seven, including three in a row with no outs in the sixth. After the game, Ryan was having a beer in the hotel bar when, lo and behold, in walked Cowley, who graciously signed his scorebook for him. Incredibly, that is still the only no-hit, no-run game Ryan has ever witnessed in over 60 years of going to baseball games.
What makes this book so compelling for baseball fans, not to mention being the perfect companion to the old Baseball Encyclopedia and Total Baseball, is that it provides depth and insight not only to the historical games like Reggie Jackson’s three homers in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series or Derek Jeter’s final game, Sept. 28, 2014 at Fenway Park, but also many delightfully quirky games that would have otherwise been lost in time. To wit: On Aug. 8, 2003, in the second game of a Red Sox-Orioles doubleheader at Fenway Park, David Ortiz hit a two-out bases-loaded chopper to the mound on which Orioles pitcher Eric DuBose charged in and gloved, then continued on to home plate for the inning-ending force out. As he inscribed “1U” (pitcher unassisted) in his scorecard, Ryan looked around the pressbox as Gene Michael, standing behind him, said assuredly: “In all my years in baseball I never saw that either.”
For some reason that even Ryan can’t explain, he covered — and scored — both Sparky Anderson’s first game and last game as Tigers manager. And then there was this humdinger: May 31, 1999, Red Sox 8, Tigers 7 which featured 10 pitchers, six homers, three ejections and four hit batsmen including Detroit’s Damion Easley a record-tying three times. As Chuck elaborated: “Easley was hit by a 132 pitches in his career, which lasted 1,706 games but the pain of being hit so frequently was less than the pain Easley suffered from never having played in a postseason game.” Chuck then added: “Perhaps he should be better known not for being hit by pitches but rather for the pop up that ended the fifth inning on September 6,1995 off Mike Mussina that made the game official, certifying that Cal Ripken had broken Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak.” This is the kind of wonderful minutia that proliferates this book and further exemplifies the joy of baseball. Kudos brother Bob.
