Joe Girardi Gets a Fresh Start in a Shifting NL East

The NL East: A division that, if it had ever been noble, would be referred to here as “once noble” now.

That’s a bit unfair; there was some nobility to Atlanta wailing on this Senior Circuit subset for a decade and a half. But these days, it’s been a harbor for a few disappointing Nationals squads (this year’s a notable exception), a weird Mets run, and some airtight regular season Braves teams. Ronald Acuña Jr., Juan Soto, Pete Alonso; some of the game’s most prolific young hitters are bedeviling pitching in the East, and now the division’s newest manager, Joe Girardi, will be strategizing against them.

Announced as the Phillies’ 55th manager last Thursday, Girardi takes over for his beaten-down and very tan predecessor, Gabe Kapler, inheriting team the closest it has been to a winner since 2011 but also one that has continuously found ways to not win. As stories have squeaked out about the team’s 2019 season, it has become apparent that a little structure and a little experience might go a long way in straightening things out in South Philly. There’s star power in Bryce Harper and J.T. Realmuto, as well as promise in Scott Kingery and Adam Haseley, and Aaron Nola can still be expected to anchor the rotation. And though there are plenty of spots to fill in the months ahead, the Phillies nabbed one of the most popular names on the managerial market, one who is already impacting the division just by accepting the job.

The ebb and flow of managerial hires across baseball is always apparent, if not obvious. There are trends. There are trials. Sometimes everybody’s starting over at once. Sometimes, Bobby Valentine sounds like a great idea. Right now, everybody wants one of those early-40s ex-players ready to be dazzled by a spreadsheet. The Phillies just tried one of those in 2017. Now they’re ready to try something else.

Back when Girardi first joined the NL East in 2006, he was something of an outlier as the only first-year, first-time major league manager in baseball. Sure, Joe Maddon was starting his managerial journey as well, but he’d managed 51 total games for the Angels in 1996 and 1999; the early ideas for his t-shirt empire were already forming. Girardi’s record was completely clean, though he had been the bench coach for the Yankees, so he at least knew how the bullpen phone worked (turns out: like a normal phone). This is sometimes not easy, as Girardi’s new team knows.

The hot young managing prospect was replacing grizzled veteran skipper Jack McKeon, who was 74 in 2004 and had 13 years of experience behind him with five different teams. He was a man who valued a diligent effort, and whose temperament was considered compassionate and gentle; at least when compared to, say, Larry Bowa, who had preceded him in San Diego.

“He’s willing to give players a chance,” wrote The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1998, “and if they prove themselves, he’s reluctant to take away the job they earned.”

But by the end of 2005, the Marlins had shifted into a rebuild and McKeon wasn’t going to be a part of it. They went with Girardi, a 41-year-old with the haircut and the forearms of a guy you wouldn’t honk at for cutting you off.

Girardi was a trend-making selection, interviewing two times each for jobs with the Marlins and Devil Rays (the job that went to Maddon). Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria took a moment away from being weaselly about something to say say he felt “in his gut” that Girardi was the man for the job and, “In the gut is where most great baseball decisions begin,” Palm Beach Post columnist Dave George reminded us.

Ah, the gut; the calculator of the stomach. But, as the season wore on, Loria’s gut started to tell him other things. Like that Girardi, despite keeping the Fish in Wild Card contention despite the lowest payroll in baseball, needed to be replaced; that, despite Girardi getting NL Manager of the Year chatter, the Marlins should get in touch with Fredi Gonzalez and have a deal in place for him to manage the team before they’d even fired Girardi.

Sometimes guts are wrong.

“Joe is not returning because he was not a good fit,” Marlins GM Larry Beinfest told reporters. Six weeks later, Girardi was named NL Manager of the Year by two different entities: Once by the BBWAA and once by the Sporting News.

Sometimes guts are wrong twice.

Now, Girardi returns to the NL East at 55 years old, taking on the role of the grizzled veteran, rather than the fresh-faced rookie, in a reversal of the circumstances that played out last time in Florida: A manager with a decade of experience is replacing a manager who had none when he started in Philadelphia, but in both cases, ownership thought Girardi was the man for the job.

Gut decisions play a big factor in Girardi’s new role with the Phillies; namely in the perception that Kapler hadn’t done enough managing with his. The Phillies, rushing to catch up with the modern sport, has an analytics department putting out useful numbers, but the numbers are only as useful as the person using them. Kapler was a rookie, plucked from his previous role as the Dodgers’ director of player development. Managing the Phillies was his first in-game managerial experience, outside of a season at Single-A, and it remains to be seen whether or not he’ll get to capitalize on it with a job elsewhere.

Girardi and Kapler were both about the same age when they got their first managing jobs. But Girardi, whose hiring was once the product of gut instinct, is now being hired because he is able to make them himself: He is viewed as a stabilizing force and a steadying hand, whose experience — which is what we actually mean when we say “gut” — has already been established. It’s not difficult to see that this is the Phillies trying to balance the output of their analytics department by bringing in an in-game strategist who has converted numbers into success.

Girardi’s hire has impacted a division with teams ready for change, but not always ready to change. The Mets were at one point linked to the former Yankees skipper to fill their managerial vacancy, and their fans buzzed at the idea of Girardi, a stately figure of championship New York baseball, sitting there, totally available. But by seemingly not taking their own pursuit of him very seriously, the Mets sent a message; the same message they’ve been sending for years: This is not a managing job for which we want a manager. We want a collaborator. We want, as the New York Post put it, a “cheap puppet.”

Regardless, with a hurried wave from the window of a speeding car, Girardi is back in the NL East. He has spent more time beating the teams in it than coaching them, going 51-39 against the division as the manager of the Yankees from 2008-17, and 31-21 against the Mets specifically. He enters a division that has produced four World Series champions since realignment in 1994, the last being over 10 years ago. In that same time span, it has featured 14 teams that have lost 95 games or more, and five 100-loss squads. It is not a parade of champions.

At the start of 2018, the NL East had three rookie managers: One is now playing in the World Series, two have been (or will be) replaced. The definition of a good manager will always change. You can be the Manager of the Year and they’ll fire you; you can give somebody a gut feeling and they’ll hire you. Girardi was brought into the Phillies to manage from experience. Here’s hoping he’s learned from his, because in the NL East — his new home — they don’t always do that.