I'm talking about the last 4 or 5 years. They lost both Clemens and Pettitte to Houston, and who did they have? They haven't had decent starting or relief pitchers in years. Wang has done a great job, but he's also been injured at some point every season. Moose has been hit or miss. And that's been the extent of it. One or two reliable starters isn't enough.
Torre has also had the benefit of some absolute pure luck, ala Shawn Chacon and Aaron Small in 2005, A-Rod's surge last year, etc.
Girardi doesn't have that this year outside of Pettitte and Mussina. Wang has been hurt down the stretch, Hughes and Kennedy have been atrocious, and Joba has only been here recently.
Two reliable starters aren't enough, but you can't blame that on Girardi. Torre had the benefit of a lot of luck, and you saw the *real* Yankees when they got booted by real teams like the Angels, Tigers, and Indians.
Originally Posted By: Sicilian Babe
I think that both Torre and Girardi have had to play with whoever they've been given. And that SUCKS. But, as I said earlier, Torre's main talent is to squeeze a performance out of a player that he didn't even know he had in him.
Squeezing out performances by riding out favorites even though they were terrible (ala Miguel Cairo) and ruined the arms of pitchers again with Papa Joe's favorites (laundry list starts with Scott Proctor, Paul Quantrill, etc.). Torre can't manage a bullpen to save his life.
And for all this talk of squeezing out performances, I must be missing all this clutch awesomeness oozing out of his Bigelow Green Tea when we looked like trash against Anaheim, Detroit, and Cleveland.
Originally Posted By: Sicilian Babe
If anything, I think that Cashman should have been fired last year, for the reasons that we both gave. Torre wasn't the problem, and neither is Girardi.
Cashman is the only one who has protected the farm system, cultivated talent, and brought some sort of sensibility to deals. The best thing that happened to the Yankees in the last couple of years is Hank started drooling out of his mouth and now the Tampa group has lost control.
