Girardi deserves praise for refusing to pamper starting pitchers

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Joe Girardi won the Yankees' 27th World Series title in his second year as New York's manager. Getty Images

Mollycoddle (verb): To be overprotective and indulgent toward; to pamper.
-- WordNet definition

I once knew a Molly Coddle. Close friend of Jimmy Jack. Neither is related to Joe Girardi, as it turns out, and for that we should all be grateful.

The World Series gave us a novel's share of heroes -- Hideki Matsui, Chase Utley, Alex Rodriguez, Mariano Rivera -- but for me, the lasting impression will be Girardi's three-man rotation. He used it throughout the postseason, 15 games' worth, with spectacular success. He turned back the clock, drove a lot of people nuts, and emerged with a great big trophy in his hands.

Checking the national-media reports as the World Series reached its most crucial stage, you got the impression Girardi was an odd sort of dead man walking. "You'd better be right, you idiot," was the general tone. "Because you'll lose your job if you blow this."

In truth, Girardi's job never was in jeopardy, but such was the tone of panic and paranoia as the Yankee manager wielded that deadliest of weapons: common sense. He employed a strategy that worked in baseball for, oh, about 70 years, not including the 19th century.

Somewhere along the line -- and I'm sure it's connected in some sinister way with the Nixon administration -- baseball lost its way. Forever the province of workhorse starters, pitching entire seasons on three days' rest and approaching 150 pitches in a given start, the game surrendered to the Mollycoddle Generation. Five-man rotations became the rage, and "100 pitches" equated to a traumatic overload, certain to destroy a man's arm and perhaps cause flooding in the neighboring streets.

The old-school guys didn't know whether to holler or weep. A number of them, including Bob Gibson and Robin Roberts, were hanging around this year's World Series, wondering aloud what happened to the game's integrity. "I don't get it," Gibson said after Game 4. "A guy can't pitch with three days' rest? I don't think it's going to kill somebody."

Or to put it another way: When are these modern-day managers gonna stop Jimmy-Jackin' around? They're mollycoddlin' these guys.

It was so refreshing to watch Girardi go through a month of excruciatingly tense baseball with CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Andy Pettitte as his starters. It could have been Koufax, Drysdale and Podres; Lopat, Reynolds and Raschi; Holtzman, Hunter and Blue -- open most any page in the World Series record book. There wasn't any big puzzle to the strategy. Teams went with their very best, not some questionable fourth or fifth starter, with the idea of rising above the rest. Other sports, notably football and basketball, have found ways to maximize the "bigger, faster, stronger" element and develop athletes more fit and productive than ever before. Baseball has managed to go backward, and it's not as if the pitch-count madness has improved the product. There has never been an era with more elbows, forearms, rotator cuffs and labrums on the shelf.

Without question, Girardi didn't have many options. Over the course of the regular season, the Yankees pampered a potentially excellent starter, Joba Chamberlain, into a virtually worthless malaise. Chad Gaudin didn't strike anyone as a particularly attractive No. 4 man. Still, Girardi had to pull the trigger on a traditional stance, and I found it astounding how many seasoned critics -- people who grew up watching the likes of Gibson, Jim Palmer and Jack Morris -- were appalled. Somehow, they forgot. They all got fitted for enormous spectacles, assembled libraries full of statistical analysis and moved into the basement, surfacing only for meals, or to pay the plumber. At least Tim McCarver got it right. During Fox's Game 6 broadcast, he said that after facing and catching pitchers throughout the 1960s, there was "no discernible difference" between pitchers working on four, three or (in rare cases) even two days' rest.