YOU take a look around the Yankees’ clubhouse and recognize that they’ve brought over just about everything from across the street, and then some, including a personal computer at every locker.
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There’s one thing you will not find in the new digs, however, and that is the manager’s doghouse in which relief pitchers were banished for months at a time at the old address.
There, you were either a Joe Torre Guy or you weren’t. If you were a Torre Guy, you pitched pretty much until your arm fell off. Isn’t that right, Tanyon Sturtze, Scott Proctor, Paul Quantrill, Flash Gordon and Ron Villone?
And if you weren’t, you subsisted on Alpo and Milk Bones.
But there is no such caste system with Joe Girardi running the show. Or as Brian Bruney, a man who spent a fair amount of time in Torre’s Chateau Bow Wow, said in The Bronx before the Yankees’ seven-game win streak was halted by Toronto, 5-4: “Everybody here knows that Girardi has confidence in them by the way he uses us. It’s not one or two guys. It’s everybody.
“It’s tough for anybody to go out and do the job knowing the manager doesn’t have confidence in you.”
That goes for the position players as well as the pitching staff, starters and relievers alike. But the bullpen illustrates the most obvious difference between the past and present manager.
In 2005, three Yankees were among the top 11 in the AL in innings pitched by a reliever; in 2006, three Yankees were among the top nine; in 2007, two were in the top 13. Last year, in Girardi’s first season running the show, no Yankees relief pitcher was among the top 12.
This year, even with Chien-Ming Wang compromised and Joba Chamberlain unable to deliver consistent length, Alfredo Aceves ranks highest, at 12th in the league after last night’s four shutout innings in relief of Sergio Mitre that allowed the rest of the corps to, well, rest.
“The bullpen to me is something you really have to watch,” Girardi said. “You have to be careful that you don’t fall in love with one guy because then you wear him down and he no longer can be effective.
“The key is to be effective for the whole year, not two weeks or a month.”
Girardi has transformed a weakness into a strength, and he has done it with his own household names, such as Aceves, Bruney, Dave Robertson and Phil Coke as the supporting cast for Phil Hughes and Mariano Rivera. He has done with converted starters Hughes and Aceves and he has done it even though Coke is the only left-hander in the pen, a situation general manager Brian Cashman must remedy.
When a relief pitcher struggles, Girardi doesn’t bury him. Instead, the manager recalibrates and gives the pitcher an opportunity to build himself up. Roles are fluid.
“Hughes is the eighth inning guy, but it’s not like he’s going to pitch every day,” said Bruney, who earlier failed an audition for the setup job. “You just have to go back to Friday’s 15-inning [2-0 victory over Boston] as an example of everybody responding to being used in pressure situations.
“That’s because we’re rested and ready.”
The road to the Canyon of Heroes remains long and winding. The sweep of the Red Sox may be a signal moment, but the Yankees swept a five at Fenway Park in 2006 and still lost ignominiously to Detroit in the first round of the playoffs. In other words, Girardi’s bullpen and Girardi’s Yankees haven’t done anything yet.
But they sure seem primed. No one in the lineup is having a career year, yet the Yankees have the best record in baseball. The marquee starters are living up to their billing. No relief pitcher is overworked and thus none seems in danger of imploding.
“Girardi is careful with the way he uses us,” said Bruney. “He communicates with us directly more than any manager I ever played for.
“He’s a players’ manager.”
A relief pitchers’ manager, too.
Plural.