Joe Girardi The Right Man for New York

• October
• 31

10:33 am New York Yankees, sports tickets, mlb, baseball

The New York Yankees have created a situation, in which their manager’s incentives better reflect the long-term goals of the club, deciding to hire a younger manager Joe Girardi giving him a 3-year contract.

In case Joe Torre had agreed to stay with the team, would he have been willing to balance the long-term needs of the Yankees against his own desire to win in this year? It seems the team did not think so. There is not much of concern when you are trying to rebuild the roster around young baseball players and the manager has only one or two years until retirement.

Joe Girardi did not want to fill the 2006 Florida Marlins rotation with rookies. He was overruled by the front office. It was actually a move that worked to Girardi’s benefit.

The New York Yankees’ offer to Joe Torre, which was a huge dollar figure, signaled that they were ambivalent about having Torre return as manager. He showed himself to be a strong manager of a veteran club with defined roles for most of its members.

Probably the biggest criticism of Joe Torre is that he didn’t have any track record of developing young starters. Pettitte, for instance, already had one year of good pitching under his belt when Joe Torre arrived in 1996, leaving Wang as the only starter to reach the majors under him and develop into a starter with the club.

With the New York Yankees, Joe Girardi will inherit a pitching staff that does not differ from the one he had in Florida: a rotation with one durable veteran at its top (Chien-Ming Wang) and 2 or 3 young players (Joba Chamberlain, Phil Hughes, and Ian Kennedy) at its back end.