Girardi can say he wasn't hired to put on a farewell tour all he wants. He was, and he betrayed both himself and the fans by doing so.
From the start of the season through the end of July, Derek Jeter hit .277/.331/.326. It was far from classic Jeter, but given that major league shortstops are hitting .255/.311/.368 this year and number-two hitters are averaging .261/.322/.394, well, Jeter still wasn't helping, but he wasn't necessarily killing the Yankees. If keeping him in the lineup was a crime, it was a misdemeanor, not a felony.
Since then, as you've no doubt heard, despite the ongoing farewell appearances and esoteric gifts from former opponents and the protestations of manager Joe Girardi, it has been a different story. Barring an unlikely hot finish -- and with Jeter's flair for the dramatic, it shouldn't surprise anyone if he homers in his final at-bat, Teddy Ballgame-style -- he's going to go out being every inch the 40-year-old shortstop he is, having slumped to .181/.218/225 in his last 40 games (his home run on Thursday evening changes these numbers but little, but certainly underscores the "flair for the dramatic" part of the above).
That's a quarter of the season. That is, in the words of the Crazy Horse song, a gone-dead train. As Jeter slowed, the noise about whether the Yankees were sacrificing the season to Jeter's farewell tour by keeping him high up in the batting order or even playing him regularly grew louder. The answer is both yes and no-yes, another player would have been dropped in the order or benched, and no, there was no saving the Yankees' season regardless. The Yankees went 20-20 in those 40 games, and it's not hard to imagine that with a different shortstop they wouldn't have been able win a few more games and have a .550 winning percentage, which is about what the AL wild-card leaders are floating right now. The problem is, the Yankees were only 55-52 (.514) at that time and the Royals, Mariners, and Indians have all played better than .500 since then. To go from 55-52 to one game better than the Royals' current 83-68, the Yankees would have had to go 29-15.
That's a .659 winning percentage, a 107-win pace over a full season. The Angels and Orioles have done even better than that in that time (both 32-14, or a 113-win pace) so it's certainly possible, but even if the Yankees had somehow been able to swap in Robin Yount '82 or Cal Ripken '91 or even (and somewhat more realistically) Derek Jeter '99 for Jeter '14 but all else remained equal, well, this team of injured oldsters still wasn't going to crazy like that.
So long, Frank Lloyd Wright -- and yes, the Orioles did give Jeter more than $10. That's just the crop. (Joy R. Absalon-USA TODAY Sports).
Still, in a season in which baseball's most brick-like manager, Ned Yost, said moving the depleted-uranium weight of Omar Infante's .256/.294/.342 out of the No. 2 spot in the batting order -- the total does not do justice to Infante's post-break .227/.262/.273 -- would be "kind of dumb," and then went ahead and actually did it, Joe Girardi's refusal to take action regarding Jeter as the season slipped away bears further inspection.
Girardi has repeatedly said in one way or another that if you drop Jeter you have to elevate someone else, and since his overall offense is pathetic, what's the point? "It's not like we have a bunch of guys hitting .300. So that's why we've kept it."
"PhD" Yost suggests the point: Nori Aoki was hitting .265/.333/.334 when Yost dropped him from leadoff to No. 2 five games ago. Since then he's gone 13-for-21, or .619. Small sample? Damn straight. Will he do that for a day longer? Probably not, but this is one time that small sample sizes are complete irrelevant. When the manager shuffles the batting order, small-sample hot streaks are what he's making an effort to capture. Yost happened to do that. Girardi might have done that, he might not have. We'll never know.
When I last visited this topic at the end of August, I said Girardi "knows that messing with Jeter in his farewell season is just not worth it." By this I meant that it would be more aggravation than it's worth given the huge media distraction it would have created, plus the perception of insult to the Great Man. I still largely feel that way (at my weight "largely" figures in most things that I do), but having read Jon Heyman's Wednesday column, "Joe Girardi put Derek Jeter's farewell tour ahead of the team," I wonder if maybe the 2014 season should turn out to be Girardi's farewell tour as well.
It's not that Heyman had any great insight, exactly -- he remains a better rumor-monger than analyst -- but the starkness of this statement is still striking even if it's not new:
In the end, Girardi batted Jeter second throughout the year despite plummeting results. Jeter, 40, stands second on the Yankees in at-bats despite ranking near the bottom of the league in offensive categories and last in baseball among 150 qualifying hitters in slugging percentage.
Jeter even DH'ed several games in Girardi's lineup despite spending his final season as a non-threat. There is only one explanation for his continuing lineup placements. Jeter wasn't treated like a ballplayer but a god by his manager, and that's after he promised the opposite.
Knowing the way the Yankees work, it's entirely possible that Girardi was told, nay, ordered to spot Jeter high up all year long. The Yankees don't sell a lot of those Legends seats, damn it. It's understandable to me, it's understandable to you, and it worked as judged by the Yankees being up roughly 1,800 fans a game over last year. The one person it should not, never-ever be understandable to is a manager with the slightest self-respect.
Jeter and Girardi (Jim Rogash).
Yes, the team is there to make money, nothing else. Yes, Jeter was Girardi's teammate and, one assumes, friend, and loyalty and winning (as Joe Torre often demonstrated) are sometimes in conflict. Yes, Girardi isn't just a manager but a middle-manager, and middle-managers take orders. Yes, there are thousands of fans who care more about Jeter leaving than the Yankees winning, even if catering them does a disservice to those fans who have the reverse set of priorities. Yes, New York managers deal with a horde of media that yips like overexcited cocker spaniels every time anything happens. All you have to do to understand how stupid it can be around the New York ballparks is listen to Commissioner Selig's press conference at Citi Field the other day. "ARE THE METS GOING TO HAVE A LOGO CHANGE? IF THEY DO HAVE A LOGO CHANGE, WILL THEY HAVE TO ASK YOU ABOUT IT? WHAT DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THE METS LOGO CHANGE AND WHEN DID YOU KNOW IT?"
Selig's response was essentially, "The Mets have a logo?" which left aside the proper response, which was, "WHO THE #$#$!!$#$# CARES ABOUT THE METS #$!!#$#$# LOGO? WHY ARE YOU WASTING MY %^%#$$## TIME THIS WAY? THIS IS MY LAST PRESS CONFERENCE IN NEW YORK AS A COMMISSIONER AND ALL YOU CAN THINK OF TO ASK ME ABOUT IS THIS PICAYUNE $#$#%^$!!$ BULL$#$#$!?"
"You know -- like that drawing on the wall behind you." (Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports).
Woodward and Bernstein were really ON that Mets logo story.
Nevertheless, as annoying as the New York press can be, if a manager's motivation for any decision is avoiding answering to them, not only is the tail wagging the dog, the dog isn't even a dog anymore but some more craven creature that has rightfully earned its inevitable extinction.
John McGraw once said, "In playing or managing, the game of ball is only fun for me when I'm out in front and winning. I don't give a hill of beans for the rest of the game." That meant that McGraw was miserable and/or pissed off about 98 percent of the time and died young, but he was right in that a manager has no other functional purpose than to be about the business of his team winning. So let's ask Joe Girardi these questions:
- Even if moving Jeter down in the order was unlikely to produce any real results, what excuse do you have for giving up without even trying?
- If you were ordered to bat a dead player at the top of the order and DH him when he couldn't play the field, why didn't you quit?
- Even though you have said, "I wasn't hired to put on a farewell tour," why have your actions been consistent with a manager putting on a farewell tour?
Given their weird admixture of the injured, the superannuated, and the injured-superannuated, chances are that the Yankees would not have won anything this year whether Girardi played to win or not. That is far from the point. The point is that playing to win was his only job and he clearly, demonstrably has not done that. Whatever his past accomplishments, whatever his intelligence, that's not a man(ager) you can respect.
It would be odd to advocate for Girardi's firing at this juncture, because he was clearly doing precisely what the Yankees wanted him to do, but it's not too late for him to rediscover his self-respect and quit.