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Joe Girardi spoke candidly about his team's struggles in his press conference after the New York Yankees were swept in the ALCS by the Detroit Tigers, saying that "it hurts when you don't win."
Girardi was left at a loss to explain his team's collective failure to score runs. The Yankees managed only two runs in the series' final three games. Girardi tweaked his lineup in many ways -- most notably benching Alex Rodriguez in Games 3 and 4, but also sitting players like Nick Swisher. Nothing worked.
The manager in his fifth year with the organization described Robinson Cano's failure to hit as "baffling" and spoke on the way the rest of his team failed to come through:
There's a lot of good hitters in that room, and to be able to shut a lot of them down is very surprising to me. Some of the guys that replaced the other guys are good big league players who have had a lot of success in their careers.
The majority of the talk, of course, was about the way Girardi handled Rodriguez. After keeping him out of the starting lineup in favor of Eric Chavez, who recorded no hits in the postseason, Girardi pinch-hit Rodriguez with two runners on last night, a decision he explained as giving the perennial all-star an at bat against a left-handed pitcher, but Rodriguez failed to come through. Girardi tried to emphasize that the majority of the blame shouldn't be on the third baseman.
The one thing I don't want to focus on is Alex. It's not just him that didn't hit. If the other guys hit, one guy's struggles don't show as much. But when you have so many guys struggling and you're Alex Rodriguez, he's going to be the one people talk about the most. But a lot of guys mightily struggled. Not just a little bit, but a lot.
Girardi said that as far as he knows, he and Rodriguez are on good terms, although he understood Rodriguez would have preferred playing.
At the end of the presser, Girardi emotionally thanked the media for respecting his privacy as he dealt with the death of his father, who passed away during the postseason.
Here's the full video: