Joe Girardi Made A Tough Call the Right Way

I'll admit I'm a little disappointed that Joe Girardi decided to re-sign with the Yankees. As a Cubs fan, I had high hopes that he might go to Chicago. I even wrote a post last week outlining, in a baseball-only sense, the reasons that he should consider leaving. Whether he made the right call will only become evident over time. But as his press conference showed, he went about making this decision the right way. From ESPN:

"After talking with my family, we decided that this was where we wanted to come back," Girardi said on a conference call with reporters Wednesday afternoon. "It's a special place to manage because of the opportunity that you have every year and the tools that they give you. The history of this organization is unbelievable. There are special things that happen here every year."

But in the end, it came down to the values Girardi said he has always held most dear: His family, and his love of competition.

"We talked [about] the possibility about a lot of things basically that I could possibly do if I decided not to manage," Girardi said. "We brought up everything, and we did it as a group. My kids love coming to the ballpark. Sometimes you feel like you're missing things that they're doing, but they love the tradeoff, and that allows me to do what I love to do, and that's to manage."

The fact that he discussed the decision with his family first says a lot about where his priorities lie. Many men would consider a job change without even considering the effect that such a decision will have on his family.

It's hard to predict how the next few years will go for Girardi and the Yankees. But this much is certain: Girardi has his priorities in order. That means considering what's best for this family even if that mean giving up a better job opportunity.

Jobs, The Economy, and Hard Work

There's a lot of talk these days about jobs and the economy. One of the common talking points we hear is that there are jobs that people don't want to do. Steve Kloosterman waded into this issue with a column entitled Are Bad Jobs Good for the Economy and People Who Work Them? Because the article was accompanied by a picture of Mike Rowe (who happens to know a thing or two about jobs - both good and bad) it caught his attention and prompted a fantastic takedown of  the article and a wonderful treatise on hard work. After taking the article point by point he summarizes the problem of our attitude towards jobs with this statement:

There’s a trillion dollars of college debt on the books, and we’re still pushing a four-year degree like it’s some sort of golden ticket. Dozens of states are facing massive shortages in the skilled trades, but we still talk about trade schools as “alternatives for the academically challenged.” And now, with record high unemployment and Detroit flat broke, you want to focus on the problem of ...“bad jobs?” Can you imagine our grandparents bemoaning the existence of “unpleasant” work? Can you imagine the greatest generation agreeing that some jobs were just “not worth having?”

Look, I don’t want to sound like the cranky neighbor on the front porch, screaming at the kids to get off his lawn....But come on -- 12 million people are looking for work and 3 million jobs can’t be filled? How come nobody is asking questions about that? Why is no one taking a poll on whether our expectations have replaced our common sense? Why do we talk only of “job-creation,” when we can’t even fill the jobs we have?

On Dirty Jobs, I met hundreds of men and women who found success and happiness by doing the “unpleasant" thing. I remember a guy in Washington whose first job was cleaning the grease trap in a Mexican restaurant. He moved on to washing dishes and then waiting tables. Today, he owns the restaurant, and six more just like it. I'd like to read more stories about people like that, and I bet I'm not alone.

Take the time to read it all.