Joe Girardi proud of young players, strong regular season
New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi walks to the dugout during an MLB baseball game against the Toronto Blue Jays at Yankee Stadium on Saturday, Sept. 30, 2017. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Despite losing out on the hard-fought AL East division title, Joe Girardi said he doesn’t have any regrets with how the regular season went.
“Somebody reminded me there’s probably 10 games that you won that you shouldn’t have won and you can do that and you can beat yourself up, but that’s not going to help,” he said. “We just got to move forward and that’s part of baseball. [It’s] 162 games. You’re going to have some games that get away that you don’t think should and some that you win that you probably shouldn’t. In 162 games, it balances out for the most part.”
Girardi said he was especially proud of how his younger players acquitted themselves — and not just the Aaron Judges and Gary Sanchezes of the world.
“We fought for an AL East title and I’m very proud of the guys in that room,” he said. “I can go back to the month of April, maybe you don’t consider [Ronald] Torreyes a kid, but he’s 25 years old and the way he stepped up in the month of April, the way that Austin Romine stepped up in the month of April — just the way our guys went about their business and they kept fighting and when things started to go bad a little bit, they kept fighting, they kept going after it. I believe we’ve played our best baseball the last six weeks and that’s what you want.”
Extra bases
Jordan Montgomery will pitch in the regular-season finale Sunday. Girardi said he will use Jaime Garcia — who was originally scheduled to pitch Saturday — as a lefty reliever out of the bullpen in Tuesday’s wild-card game against the Twins. “You could use him short, you could use him long. I’m more apt to use him long if we got into an extra-inning game,” Girardi said . . . With the scoreless inning in relief Saturday, Aroldis Chapman hasn’t allowed a run in 11 appearances this month.
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.
