Only in the Cubbiest of dreams is Girardi interested in returning to Chgo

Joe Girardi is an area guy who reached the baseball glory of the New York Yankees

Seeing the New York Yankees dismiss their field manager of the past 10 seasons makes me wonder how many Chicago Cubs fans wish circumstances were different so that they could pounce on him.

Another 'local boy' who got Yankees glory

There are those Cubs fans who honestly believe that Joe Girardi has long desired the fantasy job of being their team’s manager – that he’d eagerly give up any other job in baseball for the chance to put on the jersey bearing a baby blue bear.

WHAT MAKES IT ridiculous to think that way are two factors; one being that Girardi’s time in professional baseball has come to be associated with the Yankees (as their catcher on championship teams of the 1990s, as a mid-2000s team broadcaster and as their manager since 2008 – with 2009 being a World Series-winning year).

Stops in Peoria, Ill., hometown ...

His ties to Yankees pinstripes make it unlikely that the career baseball guy really had any desire to return to the ballclub that originally signed him, and for which he first played in the early 1990s.

Besides, the Cubs made their move to get a big-name manager some three seasons ago when they managed to acquire Joe Maddon from his long-time post with the Tampa Bay Rays (where he had won an American League pennant).

... and Pittsfield, Mass., ...

All three of those seasons with the Cubs have been the ones that the team’s fans boast have been playoff-bound; and include the 2016 version of the team that won a World Series championship.

MADDON, DESPITE THE fact some people observing baseball think he’s too much of a self-centered egomaniac, has achieved the ultimate goal. He won.

Which is a particularly big deal since it was the Cubs, the team that hadn’t won the ultimate prize for 108 seasons prior to last year.

... before making it to 'big club' in '89

Has that World Series win managed to make Cubbie fans relax enough to enjoy their success? The sad part is that there are those who are now wishing that they could somehow come up with circumstances that could allow them to dump Maddon and replace him with Girardi.

I’ve even read one scenario in which people think Maddon ought to be on probation of sorts, and if he slips up even the slightest during 2018, he could be replaced.

BECAUSE IN THEIR minds, Girardi is so anxious to be a Chicago Cub again that he’ll gladly sit out 2018 and wait for 2019 to come about – where he could be rehired as their manager.

Cubs not likely to dump Maddon

I even heard one person try to put out speculation that the Chicago White Sox could dump their manager, Rick Renteria, so they could replace him with Girardi. Just about every White Sox fan I’ve heard from thinks that’s a stupid idea.

Although it would have its ironies in that Renteria used to be the Chicago Cubs manager who was supposed to oversee the rebuild into a championship team, then got dumped when Maddon became available.

Would the White Sox give Renteria-type treatment to Rick Renteria? Would he get dumped on a second time?

It would be absurd to 'Renteria' Rick for Girardi

PERSONALLY, I’M GLAD such actions are not likely, because I think it would be the perfect vengeance for Renteria if he’s the White Sox manager who oversees a championship ballclub in coming years as part of that team’s rebuild effort.

Girardi not only mgr. fired despite success

Let the Cubbie fans engage in ridiculous managerial mechanizations with their choice of a favorite ball club.

I do realize that Girardi is the Peoria native and Northwestern University graduate (he played Big 10 baseball) who came up through the Cubs minor league system. But he’s also the guy who has moved far beyond his Cubbie origins, and for the better. He may be headed to a job with the Washington Nationals – depending on how cheaply he’s willing to work in baseball.

I don’t know firsthand what Girardi plans to do, or what the Yankees’ motivations were in cutting him loose just days after they came within one game of an American League championship themselves – although Girardi’s dismissal would be in character with Yankees history. This being the ballclub that fired Casey Stengel as manager when his 1960 ballclub lost the World Series to Pittsburgh.

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End of season really end of Sale?

I recall going to the final home game of the Chicago White Sox’ 2002 season largely because not only did I want to see a final ball game that year, I fell into the hype concerning Frank Thomas.
 

Was it really 'the end' for Sale?

Now, he’s the White Sox’ latest contribution to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. But in 2002, he was in the final year of his contract – and the speculation was that the Sox would let Thomas leave.

ACTUALLY, THAT THEY’D slam the door behind him and be sure to catch his behind on the way out.

That final game against the Boston Red Sox was supposed to be the final chance to see Thomas in a White Sox uniform. Sure enough, his contract did expire and Thomas was briefly a free agent.

Only to see the White Sox make him a contract offer that had him rejoining the team in 2003, and for another two seasons beyond that.

I couldn’t help but think this when Sunday’s 2016 finale came up and was being billed as the final chance to see current ace pitcher Chris Sale start a game for the White Sox.

FOR THE SPECULATION is that the White Sox are fed up with his oft-juvenile behavior. His earned run average (3.21 going into Sunday’s game, 2.97 for the seven seasons he has pitched for the Sox) is no longer good enough to overcome his ego.

 
Or is it?

The end for "the Big Hurt" came 6 years later

I don’t know if Sale is really gone. I suspect it’s really more up to him if he wants to return to Chicago, rather than the team dumping on their top pitcher.

Although I couldn’t help but flinch when Sale let the Minnesota Twins start off Sunday’s ball game with an inside-the-park home run by Byron Buxton, then allowed four more runs to pile on during the five innings he pitched – ensuring that even if the White Sox had been able to win the game, he would not have been the “winning” pitcher.

IT’S THE END of another regular season of baseball, and I know fans of a certain other ball club will act as though “history” is being made. Even though to those of us of the “South Side” mentality (even if we have moved and now live elsewhere), we know all it will mean is that the other team will finally have matched the White Sox in championship achievements this century.

We’ll now enter the winter dormant period (unless we care enough to follow beisbol activity in the winter leagues of assorted Latin American nations), eagerly awaiting both spring training of 2017 AND the coming of the World Baseball Classic.

Will Rick Renteria (right) be the new White Sox manager?

For which Sale could also be a significant story. For Sale has hinted he is interested in being among the pitchers carried by the U.S. national team as they take on national teams of 15 other nations in an effort to show true international baseball superiority.

If Sale does wind up pitching in competitive ballgames come March, the real question will be which ball club will get bragging rights for his international achievements – the White Sox? Or the highest bidder amongst other teams?

WE ALSO GET to see, probably in the near future, whether White Sox bench coach Rick Renteria will be the new White Sox field manager. Intriguing for those of us who remember not only the year he was the Chicago Cubs manager, but also that he managed team Mexico back in the World Baseball Classic held in 2013.

I'm sure Renteria would love the chance to show that his release by the Cubs two years ago wasn't really a sign of managerial incompetence -- particularly if he could achieve it while wearing the Old English script of the "Sox" logo on his chest while doing it.

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EXTRA: The Curse of Rick Renteria?

Don’t get me wrong. I really don’t think that highly of the baseball skills possessed by now-former Chicago Cubs manager Rick Renteria.

But a part of me wonders if his name is about to go into Cubs lore alongside that ridiculous goat owned by Sam Sianis’ uncle – the one who is supposedly responsible for the fact that the Cubs can’t even get into the World Series.

LET ALONE WIN one!

Call me skeptical that the release of Renteria as manager so that the ball club can now hire former Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon to manage the team on-field puts the Cubs any closer to actually winning a championship.

I realize that Maddon took the formerly hopeless Rays and helped make them a team with winning records – along with one that actually won an American League championship and played in the World Series in 2008.

Remember ’08 – the year that both the Chicago White Sox and Cubs managed to finish first place in their respective divisions; only to get knocked out of the running in the first round of playoffs that year?

THE CUBS COULDN’T even win a single ball game in that particular postseason. It started the latest process of deterioration that has saw some dreadful Cubs teams and has Cubs fans pleased that 2014 produced 73 victories – the same as the White Sox, whose fans were thoroughly repulsed by a ball club that could play so badly.

Then again, that’s the difference between the mindset of the two major league organizations that purport to represent Chicago.

In recent years, the Cubs were managed by Dale Sveum, who was openly regarded as an interim managed who would keep things going while the Cubs relied on minor league prospects to develop into worthy ball players.

The cheap way of rebuilding a ball club. It’s also the way that leaves much uncertain because one never knows just how close to full ability a prospect will play up to.

BUT CUBS MANAGEMENT became convinced last winter that the team had developed enough to put in a real manager.

That was when Renteria was hired away from coaching slots (and a stint managing the Mexico national team in the most recent World Baseball Classic) with the San Diego Padres.

Cubs management admitted in a statement issued Friday to announce his dismissal following one season that he actually lived up to expectations for this season. He did nothing wrong.

But the Cubs (who last year thought seriously they could lure a manager away from the New York Yankees) continue to operate under the “Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Fence” mode.

THEREFORE, A MANAGER who once had led a team to a World Series appearance (let’s not forget the Rays lost that year to the Philadelphia Phillies) was somehow considered all-desirable. The Cubs must have him.

Never mind that they may already have had the guy who was suited to lead them to any improvement the Cubs might achieve in the next few seasons.

So what happens if we wind up learning that a field manager isn’t all that significant in a team’s success if he doesn’t have the ball playing personnel to back him up? What if the Cubs don’t wind up with a batch of superstars on the cheap through their minor leagues? What if the next few seasons produce mere mediocrity – which would be an improvement for the Cubs but far short of all the tough talk we’re hearing from Cubs fans these days?

Will we start hearing about how Renteria’s dismissal laid a new round of bad karma on the Cubs, thereby causing them to fall short of a desired championship? Maybe we should point out that Sveum made it to the World Series (a coach with the Kansas City Royals this year) before the Cubs.

WILL CUBS FANS of a half-century from now be ruing the day that the Cubs were short-sighted enough (which, admittedly, does seem to be the mindset the Cubs have operated under for so many years) to let Renteria go?

Will Renteria’s grandchildren be brought back to a 150-year-old Wrigley Field to symbolically try to lift the hex?

You’ve got to admit that it makes about as much sense as the ways in which Sianis of the Billy Goat Tavern has often said he lifts the hex his uncle placed on the team when they wouldn’t let his goat sit in the stands with people for a 1945 World Series game?

Although I suspect that for Cubs fans, the real misery would be if the White Sox manage to improve in the next few seasons and Cuban slugger/Rookie of the Year Jose Abreu leads them back to the World Series before their favorite ball club gets there.

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Who’s having the last laugh?

We’re possibly only a day away from the end of the World Series, and yet the focus of the baseball world (at least those who are narrow-centric enough to believe the Chicago Cubs are all that matters) already has shifted from who will become the professional baseball champions for 2014.

For the speculation already has gone to who will wind up managing the Cubs for the next few seasons – the ones that the die-hards are convinced will produce the long-awaited championship that everybody EXCEPT the Cubs seems capable of winning.

ALL OF THIS talk started up when Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon used an escape clause to get out of his contract. Maddon has led the previously-feeble Rays to winning records in recent years AND an American League championship in 2007.

Which has the baseball world thinking he can probably pick whichever ball club he wants to work for as a next job. Cubs-oriented people are convinced he’s going to want to come to Chicago.

Even though the Cubs went out of their way to fire their former manager and hire someone new just a year ago. Anybody remember Rick Renteria – who supposedly was a wisened baseball man with the ability to relate to young talent in a way that he’d develop the Cubs prospects into a championship team?!?

He might as well be just another interim manager; just waiting for the players to develop so the Cubs can bring in someone experienced for the possible Cubs championship in 2016 or 2017.

WHICH IS A line of thought that makes me all the more skeptical that the Cubs will ever amount to anything in the next few seasons.

Impulse shopping when it comes to personnel is a large part of what can bring down a professional sports franchise. Heck, the New York Yankees have some convinced they’re not going to win a thing in the near future because they’re still stuck with past-their-prime ball players who are making big-name money so that they can’t easily be unloaded.

I’m not convinced Maddon is actually coming to Chicago. Even if he does wind up working in the Lake View neighborhood, I’m not convinced he is enough to ensure that a Cubs team would actually win something of significance.

I’m Cubskeptical because I have seen throughout the decades that I have followed baseball that prospects don’t always pan out the way their minor league statistics and scouting reports hint they ought to.

CUBS FANS OUGHT to feel lucky if one of their so-called blue chip prospects turns into a long-term regular ballplayer for the ball club. The fact that Cubs management is putting so much emphasis on prospects makes me think nothing will happen.

Particularly since the major league level activity we have seen thus far hasn’t been that outstanding. Let’s be honest. The best rookie ballplayer for a Chicago team in this decade likely is to be Jose Abreu – the Cuban defector whose 2014 season with the Chicago White Sox was good enough to win him Rookie of the Year honors.

I’m not saying the White Sox are anywhere near to winning a championship. But I’d have to think they’re closer than the Cubs – even though both of them had mediocre 73-win seasons this year.

I’d hate to be in Renteria’s position these days, where his fate depends on factors and whims that are so far beyond his control.

BUT IT MAKES me wonder if the last laugh is now going to the man who once was the Cubs manager until the team decided that Renteria was the real long-term choice.

That would be Dale Sveum – who led Cubs teams to truly dreadful losing seasons in 2012 and 2013 before being fired.

He’s now the hitting coach with the Kansas City Royals, whose staff also includes one-time White Sox player Rusty Kuntz (middle-age White Sox fans are now giggling) as first base coach – who if circumstances go right could both be with a World Series-winning team by week’s end.

The so-called loser who was too inept to work for the Cubs could have a World Series ring (if the Royals prevail on Tuesday and Wednesday) long before anybody wearing the baby blue of Cubdom does.

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