Joe Girardi isn’t in the Yankees’ clubhouse every day, but he knows the kind of questions that start swirling when a team gets swept out of the ALDS by the Rays. And for him, the issue is bigger than one bad series.
The former Yankees manager jumped into the accountability conversation on Pinstripe Post with Joel Sherman, where the topic centered on whether this group has enough internal leadership. Girardi didn’t pretend to have a full read from the outside, but he did make one thing clear: some of the mistakes the Yankees kept making should have been met with more pushback.
“It’s hard to say because I’m not in the clubhouse every day. But there are things that happen, you wonder, is someone saying anything?”
Girardi then pointed to Jazz Chisholm’s botched double-play throw in Game 2, part of a game in which the Yankees made four errors. He wasn’t buying the idea that repeating the same approach made sense.
“You said you would’ve did the same thing over again. No! It didn’t work.”
He carried that same line of thinking to the Yankees’ sloppy running on the bases, including Austin Wells getting thrown out by 10 feet while trying to turn a double into a triple in Game 1.
“All of the baserunning [mis]cues, sliding over the bases, someone’s gotta say some[thing],” he said. “Enough is enough.”
Girardi also touched on Anthony Volpe, and in that case his comments sounded more like approval than criticism. He suggested the Yankees handled the shortstop situation the right way after Volpe didn’t live up to expectations and was eventually replaced by rookie George Lombard Jr.
“And sometimes, though, a player needs to be sent down,” Girardi explained. “And have a wake-up call and say, ‘Look, you need to do this better.’
I think it happened with Anthony Volpe. I think he was better when he came back up because he got sent down and said, ”Hey, I can’t keep doing what I’m doing.
It’s not working.’”
Girardi closed by saying other teams seem to have a clearer grip on roles than the Yankees, using Tampa as his example. He said the top of the order plays one way, while the bottom of the lineup knows exactly what it’s supposed to do.
“And the other thing I see other teams do is, they understand their role really well,” he said. “You look at Tampa, the first four hitters don’t bunt.
They play big-boy baseball. But the next five guys absolutely know what their role is.
My role is to get on base, is to steal a base, is to sacrifice, a safety squeeze. It’s not to hit the ball out of the ballpark.
And I’m not going to try to hit the ball out of the ballpark.
“I think the Yankees’ bottom half of the order could do a better job. Imagine if Jazz had a .350 OBP [as opposed to the .312 he had], how many bases he would steal. It would be off the charts, and it would really help the team win.”
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