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Is This Joe Girardi’s Last Stand With the New York Yankees?

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By @ogab_3

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Greg M. Cooper – USA Today Sports

Joe Girardi is a good manager; you could even make the argument that he’s even better than that. He has a World Series ring, and has kept some fluctuating New York Yankees teams in contention. His records in New York since he took over in 2008 have been 89-73, 103-59 (and a title), 95-67, 97-65, 95-67, 85-77 and 84-78. That gives him a career record of 648-486 with the Yankees, for a winning percentage of .571. In the playoffs, he went World Series win (2009), a loss to the Texas Rangers in their three year peak in the ALCS (2010), and then back to back losses to the Detroit Tigers in 2011 and 2012, including the Derek Jeter injury season in the 2012 ALDS, where the wheels officially seemed to come to a halt on that particular Yankees dynasty. Regardless, this track record would earn many managers about five years of free passes before we would be truly analyzing job security, but most managers don’t manage the Yankees.

I have a strong suspicion that if the Yankees dip under .500 by the end of this 2015 season, they will move on from Girardi. Now, it’s easy to think that that’s a low bar for Girardi, seeing as how the Yankees haven’t finished below .500 since 1992, which is a ridiculous stat. But this is certainly the most questionable team the Yankees have had since Jeter came into the league, and it might be their worst. This isn’t a new thing; the team has gotten progressively worse since their championship in 2009, which was due to a crazy combination of injuries (especially to Mark Teixeira, C.C. Sabathia and others), free agent signings who didn’t work out as planned (I would argue the Curtis Granderson signing belongs here), a lack of dedication to their farm system, and the natural graduation of their core that led them through the late 1990′s. As a result of this gradual decline, and the obvious holes that the Yankees have in their roster as it’s currently assembled, a sub-.500 season seems well within the realm of the possibility.

The biggest reason that a season like this would seemingly bring the end to Girardi’s tenure is the organization to which he’s tied. Even though George Steinbrenner is no longer alive owning the team, the Yankees are still known as the most trigger happy team in MLB when it comes to manager turnover. This is the same team that went through a still-staggering 12 managers in the 1970′s and 1980′s, including Billy Martin roughly 70 times. The idea that a Yankees manager could miss the playoffs in three consecutive years, and four times in his tenure, would probably be too much for the Yankees’ brass to keep Girardi around, regardless of his level of fault when it comes to those records.

Girardi has done an admirable job with the Yankees. The decision that will come in the next few years about whether he stays or goes will probably come down to whether the organization believes he can lead a team that is “rebuilding,” for lack of a better word. He has always been stacked with veteran leadership and a team that was in clear attack mode. A switch from that philosophy from the management might lead to a change in the manager. Of course, for that to happen, the Yankees’ management will actually have to acknowledge that they can’t go on the attack every year, something that could be very hard for them to reconcile.

Owen Gabbey is a baseball writer who also contributes for the NFL for RantSports. Follow him on Twitter @ogab_3, “Like” him on Facebook, or add him to your network on Google. 

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