When the Yankees fired Joe Girardi as their manager last month after a decade in the job, General Manager Brian Cashman said it was a matter of his ability to communicate and connect with his team’s young players. In other words, Cashman was saying, Girardi had difficulty dealing with young players.

Joe Girardi Didn’t Sufficiently Connect With Yankees Players, read one headline.

A similar idea was suggested to me recently in a different way. When I told a Yankees executive recently that I thought the wrong person was fired, that the Yankees would have been better off firing Cashman, 20 years the general manager, the executive said, “You haven’t been in the clubhouse.”

He was right, but the idea that there was a communication/connection problem between Girardi and the young players was puzzling.

The Yankees had not been expected to …

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The news comes to you in two parts this week – old news and new news. The old news is old news because by now you most likely know about it. However, before I present the new news I have to make sure you are aware of the old news.

As expected, the Hall has put Marvin Miller on this year’s “Modern Baseball Era” ballot despite Miller’s 2008 request not to have his name on any more ballots. The Hall’s position: first you reject him, then you ignore him.

The Hall, however, knows how its rejection of Miller has shamed it and feels it has to shake off that shame. How to do that before any more time passes? That’s where the new news comes in.

A study of the nine players who share the ballot with Miller leads me to suspect the Hall is …

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With the World Series over, the next baseball development will be the Hall of Fame’s announcement of its ballot for what it calls the Modern Baseball era. The Hall of Fame has changed its ballot structure so frequently it’s not easy to keep track of the players without a scorecard.

This year’s ballot, though, is the one on which the Hall gets to insult Marvin Miller yet again. That has become the Hall’s favorite sport. The Hall places Miller’s name on the ballot and turns it over to the 16-man electorate it knows will reject Miller once again. This time would be rejection No. 7. It’s as if the Hall is in cahoots with the owners in getting even with Miller for destroying the owners in every negotiation and every grievance.

There is no more deserving person to be in the Hall of Fame than Miller for what he did for baseball, not just the players but for the game and the owners. But the owners, who dominate the voting committee, are too …

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