LOS ANGELES — The impact of a manager in your typical mundane baseball game is often somewhat overstated. As it pertains to the outcome of an average contest, the manager is, more often than not, pretty unimportant.
But any time you have a game that features four ties, 14 total pitchers and 10 innings, spanning four hours and 18 minutes, the manager’s role is thrust from the margins into the spotlight.
That’s what happened between the Philadelphia Phillies and Los Angeles Dodgers on Friday night. In that bonkers affair, several decisions from Phillies manager Joe Girardi held significant sway — some of which were easy to point out, some of which flew relatively under the radar, some that put the Phillies in trouble and some that brought them closer to their eventual victory.