If this is the case -- and it's not that he's misinformed ,or out of the loop -- I have no problem with such nonsensical disinformation. The truth about injuries is revealed to all soon enough.

In the case of Posada's and ARod's injuries, who knows how truthful they were about their aches and pains before they got worse? I doubt they were the least bit forthcoming. With more experience, Girardi will learn to to read his players' bodies and minds, and recognize when they need rest or treatment.
Until that happens, the GM, coaches, and trainers will have to serve as Joe's eyes and ears, and be more vigilant.

One of Torre's skills was knowing when to pull the plug on a line of questioning, to the point of being snippy. I remember him cleaning out one reporter who asked him about using Rivera in a certain situation (tie game at home, or some such thing) and Joe let him have it. Nobody asked a followup.

New Joe needs to learn that skill over the winter if he's going to continue to be dodgy about these things. Last night he was not in control of the situation and it was not pleasant to watch.

But yeah - a little honesty goes a long way and I don't know if he's figured out where the "protect the players" and "look like an ass" line is yet.

3 Joe's biggest asset was he was bigger than all the media members. No one wanted to get on his bad side for a variety reasons, not the least of which was to remain in most favored status and perhaps in the running as a ghost writer for one of Torre's lucrative book deals.

4 You mean like say Mo felt sore? That sounds truthful to me. It's not like Girardi said Rivera returned to NY to check on his steak house.

my take on the whole girardi discussion of injuries with the beat writers is it naturally turned into this vicous cyle. girardi started off trying to be a bit secretive, probably thinking he was being strategic, the beat writers, especially the ones that did not really want to give him the benefit of the doubt, jumped on him, and then it just escalated to this nonsense, where both giradi and a good number of the beat writers acted like idiots.
obviously some of them are not girardi fans and they push that agenda every chance they get.
they wouldn't have tried this with torre and he certainly did know how to handle all of this much better.

now, my real concern. is girardi careless with handling injuries internally? is he one of those play through the pain types? was his stance downplaying some of these injuries to the press also done with the players? if the answers to these types of questions are yes, then i am really concerned going forward, not to mention if he is responsible in any way for some of the exacerbation of injuries like arod and posada this year.

Tyler Kepner today:

"Girardi has misled reporters about injuries at various points all season, starting in April, when he insisted Brian Bruney had no structural damage to his foot, even though trainers knew he had a torn ligament. The next week, Girardi asserted that Phil Hughes had no physical problem when, in fact, Girardi knew he had a ribcage injury that ended up costing him months.

"Girardi has also been less than forthright about injuries to Jorge Posada, Chien-Ming Wang and Dan Giese. But claiming that he had not asked what specifically was wrong with Rivera was either negligent, considering Rivera's importance to the team, or a lie."

Let's just sweep Boston and get to talking about next year's lineup and rotation, huh?

I realize that beat writers want to feel like they are covering the White House, but the fact is that their roles are becoming increasingly marginalized. If Girardi wants to slow play injuries, so be it. If the media doesn't like it, find another source.

I think it would be fair enough to take PeteAbe's report with a grain of salt - maybe Pete is projecting awkwardness on the players/staff to suit his own conception. But if it's true, I would have to think it would hurt Girardi's credibility to the players. It also means the players are having to deal with a distraction/annoyance/heartache that the manager should be mitigating. "I have this damn injury, and now I also have to deal with my manager minimizing it, then I have to talk to the reporters about the damn injury, AND about the damn manager's fibbing" might go thru my mind if I'm JoPo.

6 I didn't "watch" any of them, but Gameday lets you have multiple windows open (for me tabs in Firefox), so I just switched back and forth to whatever was most interesting at the time.

I think we spent as much time talking about the other games in the game thread as we did talking about the Yanks-Jays game.

Plain and simple, I think this is an issue of the media trying to protect its dwindling turf. I don't really care how hard it is for PeteAbe, et al. to do their jobs, but what I really don't want is them pretending that they are going through all this effort for little old me, the fan.

As for Pavano, I give it a year and a half. He'll be on this team again before 2010 is over, if not as early as the beginning of next year.

Ask Willie Randolph if the press matters.

If Boston's locked into wherever they're gonna be by Sunday, and it's raining:

a) they play the game to squeeze every last dollar out of their "fans", hopefully sit the regulars and Moose gets his milestone, or

2) they cancel the game at the first sight of a sprinkle, to F the Yankees over and rest their entire roster for ALDS.

I don't quite get your point about Randolph. If Minaya wasn't wavering on firing him, it wouldn't have been such a hot media story. The media didn't create the issue; the Mets front office did. If Minaya really let the tail wag the dog, that might explain why the Mets have had so many issues over the past two seasons.

Sure, they want to squeeze every dollar from their fans (what team doesn't), but I doubt they care if Mussina gets a chance to pitch or not.

LOL. Good line, Cliff.

YES doesn't come anywhere near that.

29 Actually, those newspapers are probably down much closer to 3 million. Besides, that circulation includes a huge chunk of people who could care less about baseball. The difference is YES only cares about sports fans (and even more narrowly, Yankee fans). If you add up YES 400K daily viewers with ESPN's 3 million+, those two outlets alone trump the declining dailies.

The maybe the horribly, indignant media would get the point. Or maybe Joe could say "maybe you should just check with Cashman".

15 I like Pete, but he is constantly upset when he doesn't get an absolutely correct answer the moment a potential event occurs. You see, he is a reporter. He wants to write, or blog things before other reporters. Reporters like to be the first. It's their thing.

I however, am only concerned about the health of the team. Whatever is going to happen due to injury will be the SAME if the news is released by Cashman on Wednesday as it would be if Joe fesses up Tuesday night.

I personally believe ALL injury info should be released by the FO, so the timing and wording is to their liking. Who knows what may be effected (trades? strategy?), so I think it should be done by the FO.

Whatever the manner decided, I can't feel sorry for the press because they can't get their story before the day's deadline. I don't even like most sports reporters. They work purely in a self serving manner.

ESPN's 3 million are national. I'm interested in NY viewers. And I'd bet that while many New Yorkers watch ESPN for general sports news, they rely much more on local outlets for Yankees news. And beat reporters also include sports radio - up go those numbers again.

In fact, beat reporters include YES as well. Michael Kay doesn't like being lied to, either.

I think it's utterly foolish to think that the Yankees can treat the press contemptuously and suffer no serious consequences.

Of course, watching him manage the team for six months, I should have know that Girardi's specialty is doing things for no discernible reason.

The beat writers with the chips on their shoulder are usually all print guys. Again, I think that's because they are trying to protect their turf from not only national outlets like ESPN and RSNs like YES, but also from radio guys, all of whom don't have to wait until the next morning to get their information print. One way the beat writers are dealing with this is throug blogs, but clearly the readership on those vehicles doesn't yet match print or the other outlets.

Whereas in the past, the Yankees probably needed every media member it could get, now I don't think that's the case. Does coverage have some marginal benefit...sure, but if the newspapers boycotted the Yankees the most serious repercussions would be on the newspaper end. Quite frankly, I don't think the Yankees ratings or attendance would miss a beat if the tabloids stopped covering the team.

Hopefully, Girardi doesn't change his approach based on the whines of beat writers. He has so many more important things to improve upon than how easy he makes it for writers to put together stories that fewer and fewer people are reading.

As much as he's despised, in his few starts down the stretch, he proved that he can still pitch.

I don't feel that they would have treated him so gingerly (strict pitch-counts, etc.) if there weren't some thought of picking up his 1-year option. I hardly think they were just giving him an opportunity to showcase his stuff for other GMs.

Let's face it, I'd rather see Pavano than Ian Kennedy or Kei Igawa out there.

If I thought Girardi's approach was some how beneficial to this team, I wouldn't care if he lied about the color of the sky. As is, we have a man that is, at best, unclear, and a team fighting for third place.

It feels like he's acting like this just for the sake of pissing off the media.

Bingo. It's almost as if guys like Abraham are reporting for the fantasy owners out there.

"Crap, Mo's out? Looks like I'll have to pick up Jose Veras off the waiver wire now..."

These guys get one sniff of a story and they immediately descend on the manager for the answers. With the instant gratification of the sports blog, there's so much more of a frenzied nature to a reporter's job. When Torre first started and even as recently as 2001, the information being passed around the internet was never this voluminous.

So ultimately is it our fault for paying too much attention to those blogs and indirectly demanding this information...?

I think Girardi will be fine, but he's got to realize the nature of the beast. There should be some serious meetings over the offseason with the players and the executives on how to handle the media (ie injury news, etc.)

Maybe choosing the a more vague, but responsible description doesn't sell newspapers, but that's not Girardi's job.