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Joe Girardi: Sleeping With the Enemy?

I’ve been a major supporter of Joe Girardi since day one and I stuck by him when Marlins management pushed him out the door after one season. I thought he got a raw deal. He was able to get more out of a team full of rookies then any manager has done in history. My opinion on Joe started to sour after he was canned and I had learned how poorly he managed the pitching staff and potentially ruined one of our aces arms for the start of the 2007 season. Now this report is surfacing from Sign on San Diego that Joe Girardi had given Jon Lieber a phone call after the Marlins put a whooping on him, to give him advice to improve his season. From Sign on San Diego…

“He just mentioned that the hitters said everything that was coming in was just very flat,” Lieber said, attributing his turnabout to that conversation. “Basically I was underneath the ball. I wasn’t on top of the ball like I should have been. And that’s why the ball doesn’t have that crispness when it gets to the strike zone or that sharp break on my breaking ball. It just kind of stays right there for the hitters to lick their lips at.”

Regardless of what people say, baseball has always frowned on fraternization between players from different teams, but you can see that unwritten rule has flown out the window because the second a player reaches first base, he is sitting down for a tea party with the first baseman and the first base coach. Now mind you this shouldn’t bother me that much as it happens all the time throughout the league but the fact that is was the Phillies, a NL East rival, gets me slightly upset. Girardi was basically responsible for the turnaround Jon Lieber had last year. While it might have not had a direct effect on the Marlins playoff chances, it still smells dirty.

Your thoughts on what Joe did?