There are lessons to be learned from all of the managerial maneuvering and counter-maneuvering and counter-counter-maneuvering in this AL Championship Series, a checkerboard of moves and counter-moves and counter-counter moves that turn every game into an opera.
Lesson 1: It ain’t dumb if it works. We can call this the Joe Girardi Corollary, since this has been the way he’s done it from Day 1. The Yankees swept the Twins thanks to three things: a) CC Sabathia; b) Alex Rodriguez; c) the Twins seemed hell-bent on seeing if they could run into more outs than they could score runs.
As a result, when we saw early on that Girardi’s jaw seemed a lot more clenched than it was all year — looked, in fact, much the same way it looked for most of last year — it easily could be dismissed. When he started giving up his daily spins on the treadmill because he was getting plenty of exercise walking between the dugout and the pitcher’s mound, it could be shrugged aside: The Yankees won three straight. They won the first two against the Angels. Life was good.
Then, of course, there was Game 3, when all of Girardi’s hyperventilation caught up to him. And there was Game 5, when he allowed A.J. Burnett to start the seventh inning, when he seemed slow to go to Mariano Rivera, when the Yankees made the seven outs sitting between themselves and the World Series seem like 70. Now, if Burnett goes 1-2-3, Girardi looks like a genius. If Phil Hughes doesn’t come in and again look like a 40-percent markdown of his regular-season self, it’s not an issue. But Burnett didn’t, and Hughes did. Second guessers, start your engines.
Lesson 2: Familiarity breeds contempt. Mike Scioscia came into this series with a reputation as something of a baseball Yoda: wise, savvy, capable of managing the Angels year after year to 90-plus wins and the playoffs because his team played the game smarter, harder and with more purpose than anyone else. It didn’t hurt, of course, that the Angels have as many big-ticket players in their lineup (and riding the bench, in the case of Gary Matthews Jr.) as anyone besides the Yankees. They won because the guy in the dugout gave them the winning formula day after day after day.
That was the story, anyway. It was an easy one to buy.
Well, the more we see Mike Scioscia’s work, the more it seems fair to say that his reputation — at least as far as we knew it in New York — was based on three things: a) the fact he beat the Yankees in the 2002 and 2005 playoffs, the first manager to do that twice since Walt Alston; b) the fact that Anaheim had become a slightly cooler destination than Hell for the Yankees ever since he arrived; and c) the Angels play 100 or so games long after most of us have gone to bed on the East Coast. Most of us have no idea how well or poorly he manages day to day. We just read the standings.
Look, Scioscia is by no means Art Howe. But he hasn’t channeled his inner John McGraw much in this series, either. Where has the Angels’ vaunted aggression gone? Where is the running game? Where is taking the extra base?
Lesson 3: Try as they might sometimes, managers really don’t lose many games. We learned that again Thursday when the Angels came back in spite of Scioscia, which we’ve seen on the nights when CC Sabathia’s arm and A-Rod’s bat have trumped whatever ingenious plans Girardi’s thick book of numbers and facts inspire. Sometimes, instead of playing over-managing ping pong against each other, you wonder if everyone wouldn’t be better off if Scioscia and Girardi simply played regular ping pong in a stadium basement during the games, just leave the game in the players’ hands.
Which is where it always ends up eventually, anyway. Lesson 4.