Now, perhaps, the front office pooh-bahs will look into the team’s very glaring deficiencies a bit more carefully.
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Start with the offense, then the defense.

“playoffs are a crapshoot”
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They are. How often does the best team in baseball win it?

You battle over 162 games and then all of a sudden a 5 or 7 game series is a better indicator of how good your team is?

Nonsense. Jeff Weaver in 2006. Ricky Ledee in 1998. Carlos Beltran in 2004. Nuff said.

I think the one thing we can take out of this is the Yanks OWN when the games don’t mean anything

LOL – see what happens when I try and make a “positive” post!

I don’t agree with the assumption that Girardi did anything to help the team win games at the end. If anything, I think he became frustrated and gave up. When the rosters expanded, he brought up young guys and stuck them in the game more often, giving them a chance for some big league experience in what Girardi knew were essentially meaningless games.

Ed Price succinctly summarized Girardi’s shortcomings. He can’t relate to the people in a meaningful way. Think how badly he handled the media and then picture this guy trying to deal with the team itself. A lack of rapport led to an amotivated, underachieving team that is out of the playoffs for the first time in years.

It’s amazing how the bar has been lowered so fast. From, Win it all every year, to the “playoffs are a crapshoot” to they didn’t quit the last couple of weeks.Hate to be a cynic, but maybe generating a few more stats had something to do with it.

In a way, it’s actually better for the Yankees that they lost this last game. A win would have put them just 4 games out of the Wild Card, leaving the mistaken impression that the team was very nearly good enough in ’08—if only Wang, Matsui and Posada not gone down, if only A-Rod delivered in the clutch just three or four times, etc.—and little needs to be changed in ’09. Now, perhaps, the front office pooh-bahs will look into the team’s very glaring deficiencies a bit more carefully.

Now, maybe it’s true that General Joe has some warts…
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True, but what manager doesn’t?