Tag: Joe Girardi

The Showman

(This story originally appeared in the Oct. 2017 edition of Yankees Magazine).

This one didn’t have much of a shelf-life. But I still really liked the story, and I enjoyed the process of reporting it.

Over the course of the 2017 season, I noticed that Joe Girardi’s YES Network television show was becoming surprisingly ambitious and interesting. What had once been just a camera on him in the manager’s office, recounting a week that anyone watching already knew all about, had turned into a series of trips around different cities with the show’s co-host, YES Network field reporter Meredith Marakovits. In Seattle, they went to the Starbucks Roastery. They made pizza in Chicago and visited his old dorm at Northwestern.

The trips showed a different side of the Yankees’ manager. Often chided for his reliance on on his binder, or his less-than-comfortable manner in front of the microphone (although I’d argue that over the second half of his Yankees tenure, he’d improved in both facets dramatically), Girardi was playful and engaging throughout the television broadcasts. He seemed, despite the artifice that the cameras necessitated, somewhat … real?

So I got them to allow me to tag along for a trip to the Dallas Cowboys’ sparkly practice facility north of Dallas. It was a quick trip — a night in Texas, total of about 20 hours. But it was great to see the whole shoot, to see how the show came together, to watch him engage with the Cowboys personnel (including head coach Jason Garrett). It was also, I have to say, a lot of fun to get to take the tour (even if it felt like a betrayal of my Giants roots).

I always got along well with Girardi. I think he’s a good man, with a good heart. I’ll never forget the times I got to watch him interact with young kids away from cameras, or the way he wore the shirts for different charities during every pregame presser for a few seasons. It was a remarkably kind gesture, and totally selfless. I doubt that he thought much about me either way, but I really got the sense of Girardi’s decency.

He also, it should be said, had a ton of success in New York, from the World Series championship in 2009, to the awesome performance by his 2017 group, that would end up a game shy of the World Series.

So, to put it mildly, there were a host of reasons I felt bad to see him let go once the team was eliminated, not the least of them being the fact that it made my feature about him in that month’s magazine look somewhat silly. But oh well. I still enjoyed the process, enjoyed the story, and enjoyed my four years working with Girardi.

https://www.mlb.com/yankees/news/yankees-manager-joe-girardi-show/c-258700434

Triple Fantasy

As part of the Yankees’ 20th anniversary celebration of the 1996 World Series champs, I spoke with Joe Girardi, who hit a crucial, unforgettable triple in Game 6.

Girardi is always great to deal with, especially because my stories don’t focus too much on the day-to-day grind of the season. For the stories that I write, with wider focus, he’s easy to talk with, he’s intelligent, and he always seems to at least try to give real thought to his answers.

For this Q&A, we chatted in the stands after batting practice during the last full week of spring training. At the beginning, it seemed like he was just giving me the time that he had to, but midway through, the deeper we got into the conversation, it became clear how much these memories mean to him. Think it turned out to be a good talk, but one that took a little while to get going.

Hope you enjoy.

Bit by Bit, Putting it Together

For the 2016 Yankees Yearbook (and the Spring Training issue of our magazine), I was assigned to write about the Yankees’ offseason acquisitions. About a decade ago — even less, really, when you consider some recent offseasons like 2008-09 and 2013-14 — it would have seemed crazy to think of how uneventful the past few months were in the Yankees front office. For the first time since free agency began, the club didn’t sign a single player to a major league offer.

As such, putting the story together was a bit more challenging than I would have originally thought. How much was there to say about adding a fourth outfielder in Aaron Hicks, a castoff middle infielder in Starlin Castro, and a closer facing discipline for domestic abuse in Aroldis Chapman.

Obviously, there’s no way to write about the Yankees’ offseason in a way that makes it seem like the club signed David Price and Jason Heyward. But in talking to people around the office, I got to understand some of the philosophical foundation on which the offseason was built. I think the story that resulted was a compelling look at a quiet — but possibly quite impactful — few months.