MetaPiece Theater

A blogger interviews an online columnist’s regular podcast guest. If anyone would have tweeted during the interview I’m pretty sure that time would have folded in upon itself.

Anyway, from Chop-N-Change’s Alex Remington, here’s the famous JackO on the Yankees:

I think Girardi is very lucky that George Steinbrenner is no longer at the helm. I was thinking this week that losing 2 out of 3 to the Nationals would have triggered a legendary Steinbrenner explosion. I could envision post-game tirades and savage quotes in headlines in the New york tabloids. That performance coupled with their record against the Sox might have lead to Joe looking for work. In his heyday, George certainly fired people for less.


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Jason @ IIATMS
14 years ago

Maybe it’s me, but didn’t Torre survive some 12 years, including the last 6 or so without a title?  Most of those had George at the helm.

The “old George” hasn’t been around since the 80’s, really.  He was suspended in the early 90’s and that allowed the Yanks to finally build from within, without chasing every free agent.  Those years delivered Posada, Pettitte, Mo, Jeter, et al. which helped create the dynastic late 90’s teams that tore Craig’s heart apart, twice.

George really last fired a manager in 1995. 

And lastly, since when was constant manager upheaval good for anything besides unintentional comedy and back page fodder?

Jeremy Fox
14 years ago

Bill James once argued at least semi-seriously that the Yankees’ repeated hiring and firing of Billy Martin actually made sense. The argument was that bringing in the intense Martin gave the team a greater short-term boost in performance than was possible via any other means. But in the long run Martin’s intensity would wear on the players and they’d stop responding, at which you point Martin would be fired. The team would then relax and play better, but if they ever started getting lax Martin would be brought back in. James didn’t back up this argument with stats or anything, he was just throwing it out there as a thought-provoking idea.