THE 10-year-old boy believed in playing by the rules and listening to his elders. When his coach told him to do something, Joe Girardi always gave it his best shot for his team, the Sea Merchants.
If that meant finishing first in the “Sea Merchant Mile” before each game, Girardi would lead the pack every time.
“I can’t remember anybody ever beating Joe,” says Dave Rodgers, who was Girardi’s coach from ages 10-12 and remains a family friend.
“When Joe hit that triple against Greg Maddux,” Rodgers says of Girardi’s triple, the monster hit in Game 6 of the 1996 World Series, “I watched him run around those bases, he had that short little choppy thing going with his arms swinging, he ran just like he ran in the Sea Merchant Mile.”
Girardi did what he had to do to make himself a better player. If that meant sleeping with a long sock cut off at the toe end and slipped onto his right arm to keep that arm warm at night, Girardi would dutifully follow Rodgers’ Rules. That also meant no air conditioner, because the coach believed AC would make a body stiff and sore.
“The whole Girardi family,” Rodgers says of those hot summer nights, “had to go without air conditioning. I don’t know if anybody else on the team listened to me but Joe. I always had to be careful of what I said because Joe would follow it to the letter.”
Rodgers remembers Joe’s mom Angie once telling him: “Many a night we slept in sweaty sheets because we had to follow Coach Rodgers’ rules.”
As for that sock, many years later Joe’s wife Kim asked Rodgers: “Is it all right for Joe to stop wearing that sock on his arm?”
The truth is Girardi stopped wearing the sock his junior year in high school, “once I realized I was not going to be a pitcher,” he says.
“That’s how dedicated Joe was,” Rodgers notes, proudly adding Girardi never suffered from a sore arm.
Yes, to really understand what new Yankees manager Joe Girardi is all about you have to go back to his roots at East Peoria Community Baseball in Illinois.
“Joe’s quite a guy,” Rodgers, 62, a retired math teacher, says. “He’s a good Catholic boy and a strong family man. That’s why he is going to be such a good manager because he is going to make that Yankee team a family.”
Family is what Girardi, 43, is all about. He and Kim have three children. If you watched his press conference on Thursday, you saw Girardi talk lovingly about his dad, Jerry, who has Alzheimer’s. Girardi’s mom died from cancer in 1984.
Rodgers remembers only one time when young Joe broke a team rule. He swung at a 3-0 pitch. Girardi hit a home run with the off-limits swing.
“Most kids would have told me, ‘Coach, I didn’t know it was 3-0,'” Rodgers explains. “Not Joe, he came around second base, his head was down and he did not want to come to third. I’m standing there and I told him, ‘You’re lucky that went out of the park or else you wouldn’t see the starting lineup for a long time.’ He knew he had just violated a code.”
Don’t expect Joba Chamberlain to start sleeping with a sock pulled up onto his golden right arm, but Girardi will have rules for the Yankees to follow. Rodgers says Girardi cares about his players much more than anyone will ever know.
“He’s in the biggest fish bowl he has ever been in,” Rodgers says, “but the piranha will be on the outside swimming, they won’t be on the inside. I don’t think he is going to let them bother him. He has a way of insulating himself from his critics. There may be a lot of them for a while because he’ll reshape that team.
“He’ll tell everybody exactly where he stands, how things are to be done and it’s not based upon unreality. He knows what it takes to win. There is just no doubt about it. All the way through, he always knew what it takes to win. No one had to coach him in that respect.”
Rodgers believed in Girardi from the moment he put him on his team of 11- and 12-year-olds. Joe was 10. Rodgers positioned Girardi at third base. That happened to be the same position the league president’s son played.
“Joe wasn’t of age and here he was starting ahead of the president’s son,” Rodgers recalls. “The president came out one day and fired me because of Joe Girardi playing third base.
“I told him if you can find somebody more open minded to coach, you find him. Well, he couldn’t find him,” Rodgers says. Two days later, after an emergency board meeting, Rodgers was back coaching the team.
Girardi wanted to be a third baseman/pitcher. Rodgers eventually moved Girardi to catcher.
“Our starting catcher got hurt one day and I said ‘Joe, you’re catching.’ He was not happy about that,” Rodgers recalls. “He did not voice it, he did not throw a hissy fit like a lot of kids do, but I knew through his mom and his brothers that I may have made a mistake. So I talked to him and said, ‘I think you are born to be a catcher, you’ve got this great arm and this great catcher’s body.’ He was chiseled, all the Girardi boys had that gift.”
The right arm was a gift as well. Rodgers remembers the team playing in a “big-time tournament” when Girardi was catching.
“He picked two guys off first throwing behind the batter,” Rodgers says, the excitement of the day still in his voice three decades later. “After that, they just quit leading off. Joe stayed as a catcher, he never left and that’s a credit to his fitting into the mold. He’s always listened to his elders.”
Girardi has learned from different coaches and managers his entire life, not just from Joe Torre but from Dave Rodgers as well.
“Coach Rodgers was a great coach,” Girardi says. “He stressed fundamentals to us at an early age, but he also made us accountable.”
The Yankees will be accountable and Girardi has never stopped learning from his baseball mentors.
“Joe thinks the world of Don Zimmer,” Rodgers says. “He’s got a lot of that spit-fire that Don has.”
Rodgers says Girardi was born to manage, too.
“If he’s true to form and I don’t think he is going to change, he’ll do very well,” Rodgers says. “I think the Yankees will be a better team. Everybody will be in the mix. Joe will be great with a young pitching staff. He learned an awful lot catching.
“Joe is fair and compassionate and knows how simple baseball can be and how much fun it is to play. New York is getting a guy who is going to give every ounce of energy he has, keeps discipline, forms a family-like atmosphere and he’s going to win ballgames. He’s going to win a lot of ballgames that they probably shouldn’t have won. And I don’t think he’s going to play the All-Stars all the time. He’s going to play the guys that he thinks are going to win.
“That’s Joe. He’s going to make it a team. That’s just the way Joe does it.”
Always has, going back to his days running that Sea Merchant Mile.