Insider | Short Hops | Love Letters
Only in Marlinsville could the feel-good story of the year splatter like one of those South Florida egret-sized bugs on a car windshield. Good thing for them they had an industrial-sized bottle of Windex handy -- and a lifetime supply of paper towels.
So now it's calmed to a dull roar, and the biggest thing left to sort out are the odds on whether rookie manager Joe Girardi survives long enough to fulfill the final two years on his contract -- or whether it's one-and-done for a man who is a legitimate candidate for NL Manager of the Year.
Why, it's been hours since owner Jeffrey Loria's temper raged into the red zone and he ordered Girardi to turn in his lineup cards and office keys.
"I'm still the manager today," Girardi told CBS SportsLine.com this week. "As a player, my whole life, I never worried about next year. And it's the same now.
"It doesn't make any sense. Because you never know in life what tomorrow brings."
You'd think that searching for a new stadium would keep the knucklehead running the Marlins busy enough that he would have no time to look for a new manager. Especially after Loria's Yankees envy led him to pry Girardi from New York manager Joe Torre's staff to replace Jack McKeon as skipper just last winter.
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| Joe Girardi knows how to push Jeffrey Loria's buttons. (Getty Images) |
"I'm the only one who knows what happened that day," said Girardi, and we already know that's not quite true because there's at least one other person -- Loria -- and probably more -- general manager Larry Beinfest and others -- who have an idea. "A lot of articles have come out that have no validity to them.
"Things meant to be internal should stay internal. That's why organs are internal."
Girardi can continue to publicly insist that Loria did not fire him and, technically, that's true.
But it's all semantics, according to sources with knowledge of the situation: Loria didn't fire Girardi. Instead, one of his minions, following Loria's orders, did, wielding the ax in the immediate aftermath of a game against Los Angeles two Sundays ago.
Loria, who sits in a front-row seat right next to the Marlins dugout at Dolphins Stadium was livid because Girardi, tired of the owner hollering at the umpires during the game, walked to the end of the dugout and told him to pipe down. There are at least two versions of this story circulating -- one that quotes Girardi as sternly telling Loria to "shut up" and another quoting him as telling the owner to "shut the ---- up."
Whether or not Girardi used profanity, Loria went ballistic -- and Girardi for a time was so fired that, as media relations officials were readying a press conference room to announce the news, the over-achieving Marlins players were told in a hastily called clubhouse meeting that their manager was being relieved of his duties.
