Joe Girardi Guy Quotations

He is the one guy who would try to run through a wall if I asked him and not ask any questions.

He was probably the only guy excited that we were coming over here.

He showed for a month last year that he was a guy who can hit some home runs. If you hit home runs, you obviously are going to put up big numbers. He had 11 in a month -- basically, in 100 at-bats. If you project that out, that would be real nice for any club.

Jim is a guy who played a long time in the big leagues. Every day he had to battle to fight for every hit he got. I like that, guys who have battled through adversity.

J.J. seems to be the guy that when he pitches, we win. He's always down in the zone.

I think I made most of my strides as a catcher working under him. He is the one guy I really felt I had to have.

We fall asleep, and the guy scores. It can't happen.

We fall asleep and the guy scores. You can't forget who's on base. I call it always thinking ahead and knowing your base runners and knowing what the run means. We learned the hard way. Again.

You go from being excited to panicking a little bit when a guy slides into him. Your emotions can get a little wavy. For me, being a baseball player, it's just exciting to watch what kids can do. When you think about it, he probably should be a junior in college.

You obviously have to be productive to be in the lineup every day. We want to make sure he is productive the entire year. It's tough to ask a guy to catch 120 games a year when he hasn't done it before. He's just not used to that, getting beaten up and fatigued.

If there's one guy that should take a pitch, it should be (Mitre). But he's got a pretty good swing. Low and behold he (goes back out to the mound and) gives up three runs the next inning. Something we can learn from.

It's part of it. To me, shortstop, the defensive part is very, very important. And that won't be overlooked. I'm not going to sacrifice that. But you don't want a guy to struggle and play miserably offensively, but he plays great defense. We need a little bit of both.

He's a nice guy to have. He can do a lot of things.

He's another guy that as an organization we love. We believe he's going to help us and he needs innings, too, to iron out little mechanical things.

He's the kind of guy you hate to look in the face and say you're going to skip him, with how hard he works and the things that he does to prepare himself. You hate to do it. We weren't able to predict the rain.

The great thing about Joe was that he let me say anything I wanted and I was never fearful of saying anything; that's the greatest guy you can work for. Joe's a very trusting guy. One of the big things I learned about him was his patience and the importance of knowing people.

It's tough to ask a guy to catch 120 games a year when he's never done it before. We believe he'll be more productive if he doesn't catch six days a week.... We want to make sure he's productive the whole year.

Great hitters are able to do that. They're still going to drive in 120 runs. You're not going to walk a guy 700 times. That would be a record.