You Gotta Have...

There's been something eating at my Yankee fan sensibility for some time now, and I just tonight realized what it is. Something has been missing from the team for a number of years, something that doesn't show up on the stat sheets, so the sabermetric maniacs can't measure it, which bugs them. And that's why the Yankees are always a big threat on paper at the beginning of the year, and then do well and...

Heart. These Yankees don't play with heart.

There are many good things about Joe Girardi as a manager, and most of them have to do with pitching. No. All of them have to do with pitching. He manages a bullpen masterfully, he keeps his starters fresh and knows who to plug in at any given moment. I don't know if he's calling pitches from the dugout, but his catcher always seems to know which way to go at the most opportune times. Joe Girardi is a terrific pitcher's manager.

With the lineup, well, there's not that much that needs to be done when everybody's healthy, but Girardi does seem to know when to give a guy a rest, when to DH somebody, who to plug into a spot when there's an injury or a day on turf that an infielder might not have the legs to handle. Raul Ibanez hit all those clutch home runs at the end of the 2012 season because Girardi knew when to send up Raul Ibanez.

So that's not the problem, then. Girardi can find the right pitcher and the right player when it's necessary. What he doesn't seem capable of doing is inspiring them when things get tough.

Say what you want about Joe Torre's Yankee career; his players would have left limbs on the field for that manager. There's a lot of talk these days about how the dynasty of the late 90s and 2000 wasn't made up of All-Stars, and it wasn't. Nobody had ever heard of Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera or Bernie Williams when they started their run. Paul O'Neill was a nice average hitter. Scott Brosius had hit .203 the year before winning the World Series MVP award.

Joe Torre was not a great tactician; he wore out bullpen arms like other people wear out tube socks. But he could inspire. When he left in 2007, his players looked positively stunned. Jeter appeared to be lost for words, which Jeter never is. The thought of someone other than Joe Torre managing the Yankees was pretty much unthinkable.

I'm a very outside observer, but from the cheap seats, it looks like the Yankees wouldn't actually notice if Joe Girardi didn't show up for spring training.

Again, on the field, Girardi is a good, if not great, manager. He runs things smoothly (except when pinch hitting for a possible Hall of Famer--the steroid thing isn't going to help--in a playoff game). When he gets thrown out of a game, he looks like he's trying to get thrown out of a game. He raises his voice and flails his arms because he seems to think it's part of the show. Then he runs his hand over that Marines brush cut and walks calmly down the tunnel to the clubhouse, probably cracks open a cold protein shake and does some pull-ups.

Inspiring? Not really.

It could be argued--probably with a great deal of evidence, too--that players making gazillions of dollars, who are professionals and veterans (mostly) shouldn't need outside motivation. They should go out there and play their hearts out because that's what they're supposed to do. And I won't argue with that, except to say that one look at the 2012 playoff Yankees would rapidly lead to the conclusion that this team was professional-izing itself to an early exit. They didn't hit, but they didn't panic. Even when they should have been panicking.

This winter, the Yankees are putting together pretty much the same team that left the field having been beaten in four games by the Detroit Tigers, plus a fairly washed-out Kevin Youkilis, who is very professional. We'll get Ichiro back in right field, Pettitte and Kuroda back in the rotation, some closer-by-committee experiment behind the plate (this is all assuming Brian Cashman doesn't have a secret plan up his sleeve) and some version of Mariano Rivera--never count him out, even at 43!--to finish games in which they're ahead.

But will they have heart? In 1996, Paul O'Neill ran at full tilt on a bad leg to save the 1-0 victory in Game 5 of the World Series. That was heart. In 2012, Derek Jeter broke his ankle on a play and still tried to flip the ball to Cano to get the out even when he was lying on the ground in agony. That's heart.

Will Curtis Granderson show us something other than a calm demeanor (and homers and strikeouts)  in 2013?  Will Robinson Cano at least look like he's something more than smooth at second base? Will Mark Teixeira be cool and professional without fail for another year?

The 2012 Yankees had some guys with heart. Jeter has it in spades. CC Sabathia would pitch with his arm hanging off his shoulder if he had to. Russell Martin had an awful batting average, but you could tell it was killing him. He wanted it so badly.

And of course there was someone with a lot of heart, Nick Swisher. And once he's back in the fold, you know...

Oh, yeah.

This team doesn't seem inspired. And so this team is not, and has not been, inspiring. Baseball is more than stats, sabermetricians. Joe Torre understood that. Joe Girardi has a binder.