ANAHEIM, Calif. — Well, this was bound to happen, wasn’t it? Joe Girardi had spent his first five games as an October manager running from pitcher to pitcher, from move to move, as if he were a 7-year-old opening presents on Christmas morning. Cool, an X-Box! Awesome, Transformers! Yay, a new football! Wow, Damaso Marte!
Time after time, game after game, Girardi seemed hell-bent on turning the Yankees into a Little League team, making sure everyone got to play every night. It was harrowing sometimes. It was breathtaking. And it had worked: every lever Girardi pulled, every button he pushed, every switch he flicked. All of it.
He rolled one 7 after another.
But that’s the problem playing dice, Jack. Eventually, the bones turn cold. Eventually, you take one too many brisk jogs out to the pitcher’s mound, you scrawl one too many squiggly lines on your lineup card, you out-smart yourself once too often.
And eventually, for no good reason, you remove David Robertson from the 11th inning of a playoff game with two outs and nobody on. You spend a few mandatory moments in the dugout scanning charts and fiddling with numbers and doing calculations in your head. And, let’s be honest: Maybe you’re also feeling a wee bit bullet proof by now.
So you make your seventh pitching change of the night.
“There were so many changes,” Angels center fielder Torii Hunter soon crowed, “I thought it was a spring training game.”
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You bring in your eighth pitcher, Alfredo Aceves, and it feels like the game ends in about seven seconds: a single to Yankees slaughterer Howie Kendrick, a double to the heretofore muffle-batted Jeff Mathis, a 5-4 loss to the Angels that all but hands them party favors as you welcome them back into this American League Championship Series.
“We liked the match-up with Ace better,” Girardi said stoically a bit later. “And it didn’t work.”
Up to that moment, Girardi was on a bigger roll than Mike McD at Teddy KGB’s place. He’d brought Mariano Rivera in earlier than he wanted to an inning earlier, and Rivera got out of a first-and-third, none-out jam. Girardi took the extreme step of surrendering his designated hitter in order to replace Johnny Damon’s noodle arm in left with Jerry Hairston Jr.’s legit one.
It was a hell of a streak. But for the second straight day, and for the fourth time in six playoff games, you could hear Yankees fans muttering about Girardi’s indulgence for over-managing. Funny, too: It used to drive people crazy that Joe Torre would make a move too few, would overwork the key members of his bullpen a bit too much.
Now, it is Girardi’s time. It means all 25 men on the roster bring their time sheets to the office every day. It means whipping through relief pitchers at unconventional and sometimes uncomfortable times. It means crossing your fingers a lot and hoping stuff happens in between Alex Rodriguez moonshots.
“I was a little surprised when he came to get me,” Robertson admitted later on, though he was quick to add, “but Ace has had a great year, and [Girardi] knows how to handle all of us.”
Girardi had been rescued Saturday night in Game 2, when the Angels kicked the ball around in the 13th and he was able to keep his emergency long man, Chad Gaudin, under cellophane. He wasn’t going to have the same luck now, even if the Angels had done everything they could to keep themselves from winning the game.
So now Girardi enters a brave new phase of this job, and we will see how he responds to his first postseason loss, one that will surely give him a shortened bullpen with CC Sabathia going on short rest today. In many ways, his career as Yankees manager begins at 7:57 tonight.
“We’ve had contributions from a lot of guys all year,” Girardi said, “and we’ve gotten where we are because they’ve always done their share for this club.”
Mostly, that’s what’s happened this postseason, too. Just not last night.
Last night there was no joy in Yankville. Bones Girardi had crapped out.