Pic of the Week

Yankees manager Joe Girardi covers
home plate after being ejected by home plate
umpire Scott Barry.

A move right out of the Earl Weaver guide to making umpires hate you. We really don't see many theatrical manager arguments anymore, in large part because of replay. I don't think I miss them much.

Thoughts on opening weekend

The Twins saw far too much of this during their series
in Baltimore.

Item: Twins get swept in Baltimore.

I think: There wasn't much of a silver lining to this series at all.

There are three American League teams with 0-3 records, and the other two are the Yankees and Red Sox. If the Twins have the same record as those two teams all season, I think Twins fans will be pleased with the season. But the Yanks got swept by Tampa Bay and the Bosox by Detroit, and those figure to be significantly better than the O's.

And now the Twins face a really daunting stretch of opponents: Angels, Rangers, Yankees, Rays, Red Sox ... 16 games against five really primed rosters.

It's easy to imagine this season spiraling out of control in April. Again.

Item: Ozzie Guillen tells Time magazine he "loves" Fidel Castro.

I think: Given Guillen's outspoken disdain for Castro-wannabe Hugo Chavez in his native Venezuela, I'm inclined to chalk this up to Guillen's mouth running out of control again.

If he were still managing the White Sox, this would be an exceedingly minor blip on the radar. But he's managing in Miami, where Castro is a hot-botton topic. I'm not sure there are enough fire extinguishers to put out this blaze.

Item: Johan Santana throws five shutout innings against the Braves.

I think: I listened to some of it via my iPad, and Santana was pretty clearly out of gas at the end of his stint. He probably didn't top 90 mph with his best fastball.

But it's good to see him back, and effective. A different kind of effective, to be sure, but effective nonetheless.

Joe Girardi overthought things in
the first inning of the first game
of the Yankees season.

Item: Joe Girardi opens himself to serious second-guessing.

Opening day, CC Sabathia on the hill for the Yankees against the Rays. In the first inning, with two on and two out, Girardi orders Sabathia to walk Sean Rodriguez intentionally to bring up Carlos Pena.

The Rays radio announcers reportedly immediately start trying to decide if Girardi is the biggest over-manager in Yankees history. They're still trying to figure it out when Pena's fly ball clears the right field fence for a grand slam.

I think: The numbers give some justification for Girardi's move. Rodriguez hits lefties well; Pena does not. That's why Rodriguez was hitting in front of Pena.

But just because I might do this in a Strat-O-Matic game doesn't make it the thing to do in real life. Sean Rodriguez ain't Albert Pujols, and CC Sabathia ain't Scott Diamond.

If Girardi doesn't trust Sabathia to get the likes of Rodriguez out in the first inning of the first game of the season, what does that tell his pitcher? What does that tell his team?

Girardi has a squad sufficiently talented that he doesn't need to prove that he's the smartest man in the room. Doing as little as possible would be the wisest route.

Managerial musical chairs

This morning's USA Today had a story on the likelihood of a mass of managerial changes, which ties in to a recent post here about Scott Ullger and his ambitions.

Bobby Cox is retiring after
29 years as a major league
manager -- 25 with Atlanta,
four with Toronto.

Dave Nightengale's piece conveys the false impression that managers used to have greater job security than they do now. In reality, managers today who have any real success get far more rope than in the past. A big part of the coming upheaval comes from a group of 20-year managers who are leaving on their own behest --Joe Torre, Bobby Cox, Lou Piniella, maybe Tony LaRussa, possibly Dusty Baker.

Some other comments:

*Nightengale mentions Joe Girardi's contract status with the New York Yankees -- signed only through this season. I don't think he's going anywhere. George Steinbrenner is dead, and his infantile emotionalism was buried with him. The people running the Yankees now are not going to dump Girardi on a whim. And for his part, Girardi knows that, so long as the rest of MLB allows the Yankees to hold such a massive financial advantage over everybody else, whoever manages the Yankees has one foot in the Hall of Fame.

If Ozzie Guillen leaves the White Sox
for Florida, will bench coach Joey Cora
go with him, or get a managerial job
of his very own?

* According to Nightengale, Ozzie Guillen in recent weeks told people in the White Sox organization that he would resign after the the season, then changed his mind.

Nightengale, in an on-line only piece, predicts Guillen will decamp for the Florida Marlins job. I'm pretty sure that would be a mistake on both sides, and I think Ozzie is too smart for that (I won't say the same for Marlins owner Jeffery Loria, who is apparently set on getting Guillen).

And Nightengale figures Guillen's successor on the south side will be Tony LaRussa. Jerry Reinsdorf loves LaRussa, but I don't think a one-and-fly guy is a good idea.

---

Fascinating stuff in the Dodgers divorce trial: On Monday. Jamie McCourt (a lawyer herself) testified that she never read the postnuptual agreement in which the Dodgers franchise was declared to be husband Frank's sole property. Bad for her, right?

On Tuesday, the lawyer who drew up the agreement said he changed it AFTER it was signed, switching the Dodgers from community property to sole property. Incredible. Equally incredible: he told the court he saw no reason to tell Jamie McCourt of the change.

The words unethical and incompetent come to mind -- for Jamie McCourt, for Frank McCourt, for their lawyer ... for pretty much everybody involved in this unseemly mess.

The Dodger divorce is working for at least one guy: A law student at the University of Minnesota from L.A. who has chronicled the entire travesty on his blog.

Damn Yankees

The World Series turned out pretty much as I expected — the Yankees' left-handed starters, CC Sabathia and Andy Pettitte, made two starts each against a Phillies team with little right-handed power, and the Yanks won three of the four.

I have generally found it impossible to root for the Yankees. The Steinbrenner era, which started in 1973, just four years after I started paying attention to baseball, was one of escalating bullying, smugness and excess. Joe Girardi, the current Yankees manager, said during this Series that George Steinbrenner "deserves" another World Series title; I have my own notion of what his life deserves, and of which circle of the inferno it entails.

But "deserve" has little to do with it. The Yankees outspent everybody by a wide margin yet again, and should have won this championship. But it didn't have to go their way.

Girardi (above) deserves credit for making things go their way. I suspected when he was hired that he was too tightly wound, too intense, to do well in the Yankee job, that in that particular environment the manager needs to ease the pressure, not apply more. Perhaps in the long run that will prove true.

For this year, in this postseason, he recognized the one glaring flaw in his highly-compensated roster, and smothered it. He had three starting pitchers worth any sort of confidence — Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Pettitte — and a stable of young middle relievers.

So he used just the three starters — becoming the first manager since the playoffs went three series deep to win the championship with just three starters — and refused to lean heavily on any reliever not named Mariano Rivera. Everybody else was shuffled in and out.

The Yankees are not a particularly good defensive team, but they don't have to be. They're not, despite the great baserunning play in Game Four by Johnny Damon, a particularly speedy bunch, but they don't have to be. They have a deep lineup, laden with legitimate switch-hitters — the Yankees, according to Baseball Info Systems, had the platoon advantage in 73 percent of their plate appearances, which is a very very high number — and Girardi wisely is content to follow the old dictum credited to Hall-of-Fame manager Bill McKechnie: "If you take care of the percentages, the percentages will take care of you."

Two-hundred million and then some will take care of a lot of percentages.

Quotes, notes and comment

Of course we’re going to win. If we’re nice we’ll let it go six (games), but I’m thinking five. Close it out at home.

—Phillies shortstop Jimmy Rollins on Jay Leno's show

* The Yankees have played nine games in 24 days, a leisurely schedule by any measure. Mike Scoscia, whose Angels team had a much deeper starting rotation than did the Yanks, called the schedule "ridiculous," which of course it is, but we don't see him or his players turning down Fox's money.

Yes, the extra off days allowed the Yankees to go with just three starting pitchers through the first two rounds. Managers have done that in the past. Tom Kelly used just three starters in both 1987 (Frank Viola, Bert Blyleven and Les Straker) and 1991 (Jack Morris, Kevin Tapani, Scott Erickson) — and after the '87 Series Whitey Herzog beefed about how the short series didn't expose the Twins weakness in he back of the rotation.

October has historically been about front-line players, not the fifth starter. With the exception of "personal catchers" — see Jose Molina working with A.J. Burnett — we don't see the backup catchers in October either.

My problem with all the off days isn't so much that it's possible to skip the fourth stater — its the loss of the sense of continuity baseball thrives on.

* Indications are that Joe Girardi is leaning toward starting Chad Gaudin in Game 5 rather than have Burnett on three days rest. This would mean a Yankees rotation of:

CC Sabathia-Burnett- Andy Pettitte-Sabathia-Gaudin-Burnett-Sabathia.

And that means the longer the series goes, the better for the Phillies.

Considering how eager Girardi has been to go for the kill, it's baffling that he'd take a Series start from Pettitte (or Burnett — I'd rather use a lefty like Pettitte against the Phillies than a righty) to give it to the last man on his pitching staff. I'll believe it when I see it.

* The Houston Astros wanted Manny Acta, but refused to give him a three-year deal, so Acta took the Cleveland Indians job instead. Two years was enough for Brad Mills, however; he took the job.

Which is the better job? If the Indians owner has a realistic notion of where the franchise is right now, Cleveland is — but he fact that Bobby Valentine was a finalist there suggests they have delusions of grandeur.