Pitching Success Seems To Follow Girardi

The last two weeks have been so disastrous for the Yankees in so many ways that the hiring of Joe Girardi almost seems like a joke. Forty-four years old, the 2006 National League Manager of the Year, a leader of the dynastic Yankees and a man who's been considered a future manager ever since he broke into the majors, Girardi is too perfect a fit for the job. Something, one suspects, will go awry.

If it does, that something will likely have less to do with Girardi than with forces beyond his control. Even if you regard him skeptically — and anyone who gets fired after winning the Manager of the Year award as a rookie has to be regarded at least a bit skeptically — there is no way to deny that Girardi is not only a manager of unusual potential, but one whose background makes him unusually likely to succeed in his new job. Having just lost the best player in baseball and saddled with an aging lineup, the Yankees may not win next year, but if they don't, it likely won't be Girardi's fault.

Understandably, most of the attention paid to Girardi's background has focused on his past with the Yankees. From 1996 to 1999, he was an integral part of a team that won three World Series. He never could hit (in 15 seasons he had 36 home runs), but he enjoyed a reputation as a domineering player, a master of the game's nuances who knew how to get the very best out of his pitchers.

Every catcher who can't hit and plays for a winning team enjoys such a reputation, but there are concrete reasons to think Girardi deserves it. After all, New York and Florida (where he guided a staff with three 22-year-old rookies in the rotation to an impressive 4.37 team ERA) weren't the only place his pitchers prospered. Girardi broke into the majors in 1989 with the Chicago Cubs. Don Zimmer, a lousy manager and a legendary tactician, was the skipper, and the team was built around a young starter named Greg Maddux and old sages Ryne Sandberg and Andre Dawson. Girardi, it should be noted, usually didn't catch Maddux, and you can't give him much credit for Maddux's achievements. But he did come into the majors in an unusually good environment for a young catcher and future manager, and he learned his lessons well.

Girardi's next stop was with the Colorado Rockies. He was the team's catcher in 1995, their first winning season. What's especially notable is that while that team hit 200 home runs in 144 games, they were really just an average lineup playing in a historically great hitter's park. Their strength was their pitching, especially their bullpen. Steve Reed pitched 84 innings with a 2.12 ERA, Curtis Leskanic 98 with a 3.40 ERA, and Darren Holmes threw 66.2 with a 3.24. Those are sensational numbers for Denver in 1995.

After his time with the Yankees, during which Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera began their careers while veterans like David Cone and Jimmy Key prospered, Girardi returned to Chicago in 2000. The team had an amazing crew of hard throwers coming up through the minors, and they set a major league record for strikeouts in 2001 and then broke it in 2002. With Girardi behind the dish, Kerry Wood began to live up to his early promise, Mark Prior and Carlos Zambrano threw their first major league innings, and Jon Lieber and Matt Clement established themselves as frontline starters. The staff that carried the team into the playoffs in 2003 was largely built under Girardi's watch.

You don't have to be a believer in the mystical powers of the grizzled veteran catcher to be impressed by the sheer regularity with which many different sorts of pitchers on many different sorts of teams succeeded while Girardi was catching. No catcher of his generation had a better record. And no team needs someone who can be trusted with young pitchers more badly. In Chien-Ming Wang, Joba Chamberlain, Phillip Hughes, and Ian Kennedy, the Yankees have an embarrassment of young pitching, enough to carry them to several titles. Girardi may or may not be the man to get the best out of them, but on paper, there may be no one in baseball who'd be a better bet.

tmarchman@nysun.com