Ryan Howard Wouldn't Sign A Baseball For Joe Girardi's Son Unless The Yankees Started Pitching To Him Again After Crushing Copious Dingers
Today was Joe Girardi’s introductory press conference with the Philadelphia Phillies. My initial reaction? Holy hell is it nice to have a guy here who seems legitimately comfortable in his own abilities, comfortable with this organization’s ability to start building a winning culture again, and comfortable with talking to the media. You listen to Joe Girardi talk and you quickly realize why this man will get his 1000th career win as a manager early on next season and a World Series championship in 2009.
So this story right here about trying to get Ryan Howard to sign a ball for his son. It’s a fun little story for sure. His son loved Ryan Howard, wanted a signed ball, Girardi sends the ball to Howard, Howard says “I’ll sign this if you stop walking me and let me crush some more dingers against you fools”, Girardi happily obliges, the ball gets signed and everybody goes home happy. Fun little story. But most importantly, it shows that this is a guy who knows how to handle the media. I’m sure that it’s not a unique situation here in Philadelphia but the media can be a bunch of absolute fucking jackasses. And if they ever start to smell a little blood, they bury and bury and bury. I don’t think Joe Girardi will be having any issues with that anytime soon here in Philly. Not only does everybody respect the body of work he’s built up so far in his career, but the media eats shit like this up. You give them a little story like this to write about and they’ll be doing everything they can to make sure that Girardi stays in Philly for however long print newspapers are still in existence.
All in all, great first impression. Now that that’s out of the way, time to fix the pitching staff. I’m sure that Larry Rothschild can help out with that.
By the way–Ryan Howard is always happy to make some young fans’ dreams come true.