PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. — Ah, the sights and sounds of baseball yesterday, of a bygone era, of black-and-white newsreels and afternoon newspapers …
Infielders used to leave their mitts — barely bigger than modern batting gloves — on the field in between innings. Photographers used to creep so close to the batter’s box it’s a wonder none of them ever had “Rawlings” tattooed on their foreheads. Sleeper cars. Flannel uniforms.
Managers arguing with umpires. Yes. Those were the days …
“Oh, I think some of that will go away,” manager Joe Girardi said, chuckling, “but I don’t think all of it will go away.”
Girardi was sitting in the first-base dugout Charlotte Sports Park, 90 minutes before the Yankees would play the Rays in an exhibition game that would also mark, unofficially anyway, the end of yet another era in Yankees history.
For 110 uninterrupted years — 112 if you want to go back to Baltimore, where the Yankees started life — every play (excepting home runs the past few years) that has ever been adjudicated on a baseball field involving a Yankee — whether that Yankee was Lou Piniella or Lou Gehrig, Roger Maris or Roger Clemens, Andy Stankiewicz or Andy Pettitte — was done so through the prism of eight (or, in the postseason, 12) human eyes. Preseason or postseason, March or May, it was all au naturel.
Until Thursday afternoon, when the Yankees travel to Clearwater to play the Phillies in what will be their first test run using the new instant replay rule. It is a brave new world that will, in truth, barely resemble what the real set-up will look and feel like, only two angles available at Bright House Field as opposed to the 12 that’ll spy every movement of every major league game starting on Opening Day.
“We’ll practice it [Thursday],” Girardi said. “We’ll have someone watching in the clubhouse on TV. … We’ll use walkie-talkies and try to do the best we can to practice, although I don’t think you’ll really be able to practice until you get home.”
Girardi will not get to be his generation’s Ron Blomberg (baseball’s first-ever designated hitter), because Toronto’s John Gibbons already beat him to it Monday at Hammond Stadium in Fort Myers, where the Twins played host to the Blue Jays. A foot belonging to Jared Goedert, Gibbons’ first baseman, was ruled off the bag.
And here came Gibbons.
“I’m not too sure that you’re not right here,” Gibbons told Brian O’Nora, the umpire, in what has to be the most cordial quarrel in the long and colorful history of manager-umpire relations. “But since we haven’t done it before, let’s go take a look.”
“OK,” O’Nora said. “That’s what it’s for.”
And with that, they went to the replay, and with that we may have taken our first few steps away from old days, the colorful days, of Billy Martin covering home plate with dirt and Joe Girardi nearly bursting his carotid artery when Ryan Dempster wasn’t thrown out of a game for using Alex Rodriguez as a dart board.
Is this what we’ve come to? Is this where we’re headed? Skippers and managers getting along famously, measuring their words, removing a potential source of high comedy from every game? What in the name of Earl Weaver is going on here?
“Managers will still argue to protect a player,” Girardi said. “A player gets into it with an umpire, his manager will still take over the argument to save the player. But there’ll be less of that.”
And as for the occasional old-fashioned, just-for-the-hell-of-it, run-me-so-I-can-fire-up-my-raggedy-team managerial explosion?
Girardi laughed at that.
“You can do that,” he said, “without a replay.”
You can also do that if you happen to exhaust your challenges early in a game, which is just one aspect of this coming revolution Girardi and his 29 colleagues will have to explore. Which is why you can feel pretty certain that the Yankees’ manager will use Thursday’s game as a laboratory, just as Gibbons did.
“I was thinking, ‘If I don’t get a call will I do it one time just to do it so I know the feel of it?’” Girardi said. “And I might. Why not? You only get so many chances in spring training. I’ll probably ask them to take a look.”
And in this gentle and genteel new baseball world, surely he’ll remember to say, “please.”