This post isn’t really about Joe Girardi, even though his name is in the headline and his decisions from yesterday are the inspiration for this post. It’s about Girardi in that he’s a human being, but it’s not about Girardi as a specific human being, because — as I think the results of the poll I put up last night show — there are a lot of people who would have made the same decisions he did. Because, just like the rest of us, Joe Girardi’s decision making process was formed long before he ever played or managed a single baseball game.

At the risk of generalizing, I’d imagine that most of us had parents who let us try things that they knew weren’t going to end particularly well because we’d learn from the pain we were about to bring upon ourselves. Whether it was pulling the cat’s tail or biting into that delicious looking lemon on the table, they would warn us that it wasn’t in our best interests, but knew that we had to experience the results for ourselves to know that it was something we really wanted to do. And, for many of these experiences, we only had to do it once before we realized that we never wanted to do it again.

We learn how to think in a predictable environment. Punch your brother? Go to your room. Eat your vegetables? Have some ice cream. The actions we take as kids almost always have positive or negative rewards that are designed to teach us what kinds of actions we prefer. As a culture, we teach children that every action comes with consequences, and that they can predict what those consequences will be based on what happened the last time they performed that action. You can describe a lot of parenting as predictable repetition.

That training is extremely effective for most things in life, because many of the decisions we face follow this kind of cause/effect relationship. Most of the time, you can effectively judge what the consequence of an action will be based on your own personal experience of what happened the last time you did that same thing. Unfortunately, that decision making process — the one that works really well in life as a whole — is a miserable failure in baseball.

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We’ll share our opinions on this move soon, I’m sure. For now, though, here are the three options you probably could have chosen between in the final at-bat if you were Joe Girardi. After the jump, tell us which you would have picked.

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Last night, Matt Holliday slid into second base to break up a potential double play. It looked like this:

I’m not here to crucify Matt Holliday. By the letter of the law, the play was legal, and we see more egregious examples of take-out slides where the runner is actually nowhere near the base every year. Holliday went right through the bag, but because he began the slide so late, he created a pretty violent collision that eventually forced Scutaro from the game. For his part, he seems remorseful, noting after the game that he wishes he had slid sooner, and his actions don’t suggest an intent to injure. Holliday did what the rulebook allows in order to help his team avoid an out in playoff game. But that’s the problem.

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Chris Carpenter is going to take the hill for St. Louis tonight in Game Two of the NLCS. During the game, you’re going to hear about Carpenter’s postseason track record — it’s very good — and about how he’s come back for the playoffs after missing most of the season. Carpenter is both often excellent and often injured, so those are the two things he is understandably most famous for.

But, perhaps there’s one other thing that Chris Carpenter should be well known for, because he’s probably better at this than he is at just about anything else – shutting down the running game.

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The St. Louis Cardinals have a ferocious offense, capable of putting up runs in bunches against any pitcher in baseball. So, on one hand, the fact that they torched Madison Bumgarner for six runs and chased him from the game in the fourth inning can simply be chalked up to a good opponent. On the other hand, the lousy performance was the continuation of a six week trend, and there are reasons to think that perhaps Bumgarner has worn down over the course of the season.

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The Cardinals are just ridiculous.

Last year.

Source: FanGraphs

This year.

Source: FanGraphs

We’re all going to be telling our grandkids about the early 21st century Cardinals and their miraculous Octobers.

As expected, Alex Rodriguez finds himself on the bench to start game five, with Eric Chavez playing third base and Raul Ibanez filling in at DH. We talked about this possibility yesterday, with both having better numbers against right-handers this year and A-Rod obviously not having a very good postseason thus far. With their backs against the wall, the Yankees are going with the platoon advantage and guys who have performed better versus right-handed pitching this year. It’s hard to blame them, even if swapping out Rodriguez for Ibanez probably doesn’t make a huge difference one way or another.

But, there’s a pretty interesting subplot that develops because of this decision – by starting two LHBs who have huge platoon splits in Chavez and Ibanez, there is almost certainly going to be a situation where Buck Showalter goes to a left-handed reliever to get one of them out late in the game. If the score is even remotely close, Girardi will have to strongly consider pinch-hitting for either one, as they simply aren’t effective big league hitters against lefties at this point in their career. And A-Rod is going to be Girardi’s best right-handed batter on the bench.

So, starting Ibanez and Chavez sets up the very real chance that Rodriguez is going to be sent up to pinch-hit in a high leverage “clutch” situation – the very role that the narrative claims he performs the worst in. At least throughout his postseason history, the narrative is wrong, but this line-up choice sets up a situation where Girardi is going to have to publicly decide whether he buys into that narrative or not.

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If you’re reading FanGraphs, you probably like baseball. If you like baseball, you’ve probably watched an Orioles game this year. If you’ve watched an Orioles game this year, you’ve probably seen Darren O’Day pitch. Even as relievers go, he pitches a lot, as he appeared in 69 regular season games, the wild card play-in game, and has now pitched in all four games of the ALDS. And, if you’ve seen O’Day pitch this year, then you’ve probably noticed that he throws from a really low arm slot, but thanks to our friends over at SBNation, we’re going to show you O’Day striking out Alex Rodriguez last night, just so you can appreciate the funkiness in all it’s glory.

Watching that, you almost feel bad for Rodriguez. How is he supposed to hit that? What is any right-hander supposed to do with a slider from that arm angle that starts on the outer half of the plate and ends up a foot outside? And, if that was the match-up option, why not send Raul Ibanez up to pinch-hit for Rodriguez? Certainly, a lefty would have far more success against O’Day’s drop-down delivery, right?

You would think. And, with pretty much every other low slot/sidearm/submarine guy on the planet, you’d be right. Chad Bradford had insanely large platoon splits. Same deal with Mike Myers. Justin Masterson’s low arm slot is the main reason he struggles against left-handers. Guys who throw the ball from that kind of arm angle are usually brutal on same-handed hitters and ineffective against guys from the opposite side of the plate.

And yet, O’Day ran through the entire Yankees line-up last night, including six guys hitting from the left side: Nick Swisher, Curtis Granderson (okay, not much of an accomplishment right now), Raul Ibanez, Ichiro Suzuki, Mark Teixiera, and Robinson Cano. That’s a pretty decent collection of left-handed bats, and O’Day just mowed them down. And perhaps the most amazing part of the entire thing is that we probably shouldn’t have been surprised.

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The big topic of discussion before yesterday’s Yankees-Orioles game was whether Joe Girardi should move Alex Rodriguez down in the order so that Robinson Cano could hit third in the line-up. Girardi declined to make that change, but did have Rodriguez DH instead of play third, which seems to suggest that having Ibanez pinch-hit for him late in the game was premeditated and not simply a reaction to Rodriguez’s in-game struggles. Ibanez, of course, made Girardi look like a genius. So, now, what do the Yankees do about their line-up going forward?

In reality, we probably won’t get that answer today. The Orioles decided to swap out Chris Tillman for Joe Saunders, so Girardi’s going to go with his anti-LHP line-up today, and Rodriguez is clearly going to be part of that effort. Starting either Ibanez or Eric Chavez against a lefty isn’t a great idea, and the team doesn’t have any good right-handed alternatives, which is why Eduardo Nunez started at DH against Wei-Yin Chen. With Derek Jeter fouling a ball off his foot in Game Three, he very well could end-up DH’ing in Game Four, with Jayson Nix getting the start at shortstop. In some ways, Buck Showalter did Girardi a favor by starting Saunders, giving him an easy way out of the decision over whether to put A-Rod back in the line-up the day after he pinch hit for him. Against a lefty, he doesn’t really have much of a choice.

If this series goes to Game 5, however, then Girardi’s going to have to make some decisions, and not just about Alex Rodriguez.

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