Joe Girardi: Did Yankees Skipper Cost Team with Layoff During Final Week?

With one week to go in the 2011 Major League Baseball season, the New York Yankees had accomplished everything they had set out to do.

A division title, the top seed in the American League, and with time to spare before the start of the playoffs, the Yankees set the course to rest up their veterans in hopes for a shot at World Series title No. 28.

Armed with an MVP candidate in Curtis Granderson and the top payroll in baseball for the 12th year in a row, the Yankees, instead, find themselves along with 24 other once-hopeful baseball clubs at home watching the rest of the postseason after being ousted by the Detroit Tigers 3-2 in a best-of-five ALDS series.

Mark Texeria hit just .167 in the series, Alex Rodriguez, .111, and Nick Swisher .211. The heart of the Yankee lineup—the bats paid and expected to do the most damage—were responsible for just five of the 26 runs scored in the entire series, and they faced Justin Verlander for really only one game thanks in part to the Game 1 rain out.

Fans want answers, and here's potentially one of them—no matter how much Yankee fans may deny it: Joe Girardi cost his team because of his lackluster managing in the final week of the season.

Put it this way: The Yankees lost seven of their last nine games, and four of those were strictly based on Giradi's game planning.

His decision to empty his bench against a wounded and worn out Boston Red Sox team in the second game of a double header allowed the game to stretch to 14 innings, with the Sox eventually pulling out the win. 

With the game ending just before midnight, the Yankees boarded the plane and headed south to Tampa for a three-game series that meant nothing to the Yanks and everything to the Rays.

The Yanks decided to rest up their players little by little over the course of the three-game series, ultimately getting swept by the Rays, including blowing a seven-run lead in the final game.

Up 7-6 in the ninth, the Yankees chose to go with Cory Wade to close the game instead of Mariano Rivera. The end result: the Yankees lose another game.

Heading into the postseason, the Yankees had now lost four straight and were going up against a red hot Tigers team that had just won seven out of their last 10 games, including four straight wins to close the season.

Yes, the series went five games, and yes, Derek Jeter was close to hitting a two-run homer in the eighth inning of Game 5, but bottom line, it didn't happen.

Their lackluster performance in the last week of the season has come back to haunt them, and now they begin an offseason full of questions when the answer all along may lie in how they played the last four games of the regular season.