Phillies fans question Joe Girardi after Yankees sign-stealing letter goes public

Joe Girardi’s integrity questioned as Yankees letter reveals cheating during his tenure

Joe Girardi is the Philadelphia Phillies manager now, but it’s his past in the Bronx that has people talking this week.

Girardi managed the New York Yankees from 2008-17. They were also one of the four teams he’d played on during his 15-year career. It was with the Yankees that he won three rings as a player, and his sole ring as manager, in 2009.

After they replaced Girardi with Aaron Boone when his contract expired at the end of the 2017 season, he landed with the Philadelphia Phillies in October 2019, trading navy pinstripes for red ones.

But with the revelation of the Yankees letter, Girardi’s tenure as their skipper is a topic of conversation once more.

According to the letter, the Yankees were using their replay room to decode and relay signs to runners on second in 2015 and 2016. They cheated at home and on the road, were found guilty of doing so, and were fined $100,000 and warned not to continue said behavior.

Of course, the Yankees were far from the only team cheating, even besides the other two punished, the Red Sox and Astros (though the latter did something far worse). But the Yankees are the only ones with a former manager who went on MLB Network and essentially told the world about it in 2019.

“I was part of a system.” Those are his exact words.

With the resurfacing of this clip, many fans, who already aren’t thrilled with Girardi for a number of managerial decisions, are saying they want him gone.

Some are guessing it’s his name redacted in the letter.

Others simply find it hilarious that Girardi couldn’t even get the Yankees to win when they were cheating.

Cheating has been around the game as long as the game has been around. It’s no secret that everyone is trying to gain a competitive edge, right down to the commissioner himself, tinkering with the baseballs to make them easier to hit, and then harder to hit, depending on the year.

By all accounts, the Yankees were doing what many other teams were doing at the time. So if you’re going to punish Girardi for it, then make sure you’re punishing everyone, so we can finally move on from all of this.

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