JOE Girardi called being named Yankee manager his “dream job” and insisted “this is where we (he and his family) wanted to be. This is where we wanted to end up.”
Which is interesting since even after the Yankees offered him the “dream job,” Girardi was strong-arming the Yankees for more money by using the Dodgers for leverage. The Yanks had hoped to pay their new manager the same total ($5.5 million) over three years that Joe Torre was guaranteed if he came back for just one year.
But, club officials confirm, the Yankees had to match the Dodger offer of $7.8 million for Girardi to accept his “dream job.” That is fine. That is just business, I suppose, though you would like to believe a man of principle wouldn’t jeopardize his “dream” for financial reasons.
Except at a gathering with print reporters yesterday after his formal press conference, Girardi said “no” when asked if he was still in play with the Dodgers after being offered the Yankee job.
Now, we cannot call comments like that disingenuous from, say, Alex Rodriguez and accept deceit from Girardi because he seems so much more sincere and does not come with Scott Boras attached to his hip.
Girardi lasted just a year on a three-year managerial contract in Florida, encountering difficulties with the front office and the media because essentially he was a football coach in a baseball uniform. He wanted not only the regimented structure, but the unquestioned authority given to an NFL head man. But the Eric Mangini thing isn’t going to work, not in baseball, not in New York.
In the NFL, the commissioner can announce he has destroyed the evidence in Spy-gate with few media peeps despite the fact that the Patriots might have stolen Super Bowl titles. But in baseball the culture is different. The manager meets with the media daily before and after games, and is asked to explain every critical move. And he cannot say he has to watch the game film first.
New York baseball fans are insatiable, an insatiability – by the way – that helps support two teams at the highest financial levels that so, for example, a manager with one year of experience can be guaranteed $7.8 million. The fans want to know what is going on, and the leading conduit for that information is the manager. And so the manager is held accountable for his words in a stronger way than, say, Gary Sheffield is.
So when Girardi is asked if he thinks the playoffs are a crapshoot and responds, “I am a big believer that the best team wins,” then he should expect a follow-up like this: So that means you think the Indians are better than the Yankees?
He was asked that. He responded by getting annoyed at the questioner. He then said the Indians were better for four games. When told that means it is a crapshoot, he got more annoyed, and the uneasy give-and-take went like that for about one minute.
Well, doesn’t Girardi have this job – and Joe Torre doesn’t – because Yankee ownership thinks the postseason is not a crapshoot?
Torre was actually named Yankee manager 12 years ago today and it is easy to forget – after all of Torre’s later accomplishments – how little was thought of him then. He was bombarded at his introductory press conference with questions about his lack of winning as a player and manager, his sanity in taking a job for a then very involved George Steinbrenner, and why he felt capable of replacing a popular/successful manager such as Buck Showalter.
The first positive associated with Torre as a Yankee was how deftly and honestly he handled a hostile press conference. Girardi, a dozen years later, hardly had the same animosity associated with his gathering, yet he did far worse. We had been told how much Girardi had grown from that bad experience in Florida and that was not obvious yesterday.
Of course, Torre was named manager of the Dodgers yesterday, just a few days after acting on the David Letterman Show as if he had never heard of such a thing.
I can’t wait for the new managers of the Yankees and Dodgers to insist on honesty in dealings with their players.