TAMPA — Yankees fans are still a little lukewarm about Joe Girardi, let’s be honest. Yes, he won a championship his second year on the job, 2009. Yes, he brings a Type A football-coach mentality, so you know the Yankees will never be overconfident or under prepared. He is meticulous. He is detail oriented. And he has won 60 percent of the games he has managed in pinstripes.
And yet . . . his approval ratings aren’t what you’d expect. Just watch a Yankees fan’s face when the television cameras flash to Girardi and his trusty binder.
And that’s OK. Because all Joe Torre did was win four championships and six pennants, and go 12-for-12 in playoff appearances, and re-establish the Yankees as the biggest brand in sports, and win 61 percent of his games. His work in The Bronx was brilliant from start to finish, and it will earn him a plaque in Cooperstown.
And yet . . . it wasn’t like Yankees fans threatened to boycott when Torre’s time with the team ended.
No, only one Yankees manager ever attracted that kind of devotion. In the days after Billy Martin was relieved of his duties the first time, back in July 1978, this newspaper conducted an informal poll and the question was a simple one: Whom do you back, Billy or George Steinbrenner? This wasn’t a point-and-click world, remember. To take part you had to actually pick up a telephone — one connected to a wall — and dial a number.
Thousands did. Martin won the poll. He only carried 99 percent of the vote.
Yes. Ninety-nine percent. Not a misprint. Not a typo. I once asked Greg Gallo, who was the sports editor then, about that vote and about that time.
“Billy,” he said, “coulda run for mayor.”
Now, remember, this was the first incarnation of Billy, before he would be hired and fired four more times, before the public got wind of his occasionally reckless behavior and his more-than-occasional foodless drinking. But the people loved him. They loved him, in a way no manager or coach will ever be loved again, not in New York, not in Tuscaloosa, Ala., not anywhere.
Why? Well, he had been a Yankee. That helped. But Girardi was a Yankee, too, and in many ways the same kind of Yankee Martin was — an underdog, a sparkplug guy, an energy guy, a spikes-up, dirty-uniform guy.
Martin took no guff from his players, and fans usually like that — yet when Girardi did that in 2008, he was lampooned as being too frenzied, too controlling, too intense.
Martin won one championship. Same as Girardi. Three fewer than Torre.
Yet it doesn’t matter. Even now, 24 years after he managed his last game, 22 years after his death, Martin remains the gold standard in the eyes of many Yankees fans — maybe not 99 percent of them any more, but enough. He is the battler standing toe-to-toe with Reggie in the dugout at Fenway, the fighter kicking dirt on an umpire’s shins, he is the epitaph on his grave at Gate of Heaven Cemetery:
“I may not have been the greatest Yankee to put on the uniform, but I am the proudest.”
Why bring this up today?
Because Martin certainly believed in team-bonding. As a player, it meant trying to drink all five boroughs dry with wingmen named Mickey and Whitey. As a manager, it took various forms — sometimes with him serving as unwitting inspiration for the Brad Pitt role in “Fight Club,” his opponents ranging from his own pitchers to marshmallow salesmen and the occasionally mouthy sportswriter.
What would Billy have thought of Girardi’s bonding idea this year: a day at a comedy club, the Yankees trying out their improv acts, Mark Teixeira stealing the show with his interpretation of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” (the imagination overflows with possibilities).
This has become a popular annual rite of spring.
“This and Old-Timers’ Day are my two favorite days of the year,” Nick Swisher said.
And a pool tournament served as a springtime springboard for the Yankees in 2009, same as a bowling outing helped unify the 2007 Giants — from whom Girardi borrowed the idea.
It’s a good idea. A proven idea. A worthy idea. Good, clean, innocent — and very dry — fun.
Yeah. Billy would’ve hated it.
