Buck Showalter And Joe Girardi’s Teams—And Careers—Are Going In Opposite Directions

As the manager who preceded Joe Torre with the Yankees and the manager who succeeded him, Buck Showalter and Joe Girardi were always going to be linked long before their paths began crossing as candidates for the Phillies job following the 2019 season.

But after the Mets’ weekend sweep of the Phillies, Showalter and Girardi — as well as their teams — look like they’re all headed in opposite directions.

At 33-17, the Mets look nothing like the team Showalter inherited when he was hired last November, when he was hired following a season in which the Mets set an unfortunate record by spending more time in first place than any team to finish under .500.

With a 9 1/2-game lead in the NL East, the only suspense for the Mets this season appears to be whether or not they’ll get one of the top two seeds in the expanded playoffs, which would allow them to skip the best-of-three wild card round and begin with a best-of-five division series.

The Phillies, meanwhile, look way too much like the team Girardi took over in 2020, and only the expanded playoffs — along with the memories of the division rival Nationals and Braves overcoming slow starts to win the World Series in each of the last two full seasons — are keeping them from being mentioned as a sure-fire seller at the trade deadline. After back-to-back 5-4, 10-inning losses to the Mets and Giants, the Phillies are 21-28 and a whopping 11 1/2 games behind the Mets as well as six games back of the Giants, who occupy the third and final wild card spot.

Much of the Mets’ resurgence and the Phillies’ stagnation can be credited to/blamed on the respective front offices. Under Billy Eppler, the Mets overhauled their roster this winter, adding Max Scherzer as well as versatile players and methodical hitters to a lineup that too often featured neither trait.

Under former general manager Matt Klentak, the Phillies were a top-heavy club featuring some thumpers and a couple upper-echelon starting pitchers but with little regard for defense or a bullpen that didn’t send anyone watching the game diving for a tub of Rolaids. Dave Dombrowski, the preeminent win-now executive of his time, replaced Klentak following the 2020 season and…tripled down on that formula prior to this season by signing outfielders Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos and revamping the bullpen by inking former closers Corey Knebel, Jeurys Familia and Brad Hand as free agents. Hand has an ERA of 1.29, but Knebel has blown three saves — including Sunday, when he gave up a leadoff homer in the ninth inning to Nick Plummer — and gave up the go-ahead homer in the ninth inning to Evan Longoria Monday while Familia has an ERA of 4.00.

To be fair to Dombrowski, building bullpens are a trial-and-mostly-error exercise and he couldn’t have foreseen Bryce Harper suffering an elbow injury that limited him to designated hitter duties, thereby forcing Schwarber, Castellanos along with infielders Rhys Hoskins and Alec Bohm on to the field almost every day.

But Girardi has yet to deliver his imprint upon the Mets like Showalter, who has managed to connect with stars such as Scherzer, Pete Alonso, Francisco Lindor and Starling Marte as well as second-tier players.

Jeff McNeil, who miscast himself as a power hitter the last two years, is on his way to the All-Star Game with a team-high 1.9 WAR
AR
with just three homers among his 17 extra-base hits. Tylor Megill, who got the Opening Day nod in place of Jacob deGrom, was the starting pitcher in a five-pitcher no-hitter against the Phillies on Apr. 29. Plummer might be the Benny Agbayani of this generation after becoming the first player in team history to homer in each of his first two starts. Plummer was filling in for Travis Jankowski, the fourth outfielder who endeared himself to fans as well as teammates, the latter of whom printed up Jankowski shirseys in his honor.

Showalter is also shedding his reputation as someone who wears out his welcome with his never-ending intensity — he opened Monday’s pre-game press conference by asking for reporters’ favorite songs by the band Electric Light Orchestra — and, perhaps, putting together an interesting Hall of Fame case should he direct the Mets to the World Series. He ranks 23rd all-time with 1,584 wins, behind 14 Hall of Famers, and is trying to become just the fourth manager to ever lead four teams to the playoffs after Dusty Baker, Billy Martin and Davey Johnson.

Girardi is the one reminding everyone that the end of his stints with the Marlins and Yankees were hastened by the desire to bring aboard someone a little less suffocating. The New York Post reported Monday there’s a sense Girardi might be too tense for a veteran team. Of course, the sense two years ago was the Phillies needed a sterner, more traditional voice than the one provided by Gabe Kapler, so again, the problem probably isn’t in the manager’s office.

But the manager, eventually, remains the easiest person to replace, even if this is an era in which in-season managerial firings are rare, mostly because getting rid of the manager removes the easiest shield for those who built the flawed teams in the first place. Discounting Jeff Banister and John Gibbons, who were fired by the Rangers and Blue Jays during the final week of the 2018 season, only three managers have been dismissed in the middle of a season since 2016: Fredi Gonzalez (after 37 games with the Braves in 2016), Bryan Price (after 18 games with the Reds in 2018) and Mike Matheny (at the All-Star Break with the Cardinals in 2018).

The 2021 Braves and 2019 Nationals — for whom Davey Martinez was walking the managerial green mile until the team overcame a 19-31 start to win a World Series — are reminders of how things can turn over the course of a long season. But with Girardi in the final season of his contract and in the unenviable position of working for a general manager who didn’t hire him, he’s likely going to need a deep playoff run — one unimaginable at the moment — to even entertain the thought of continuing to manage against Showalter in 2023.