The Yankees have reportedly offered the job of manager to former Yankees catcher and Marlins manager Joe Girardi, bypassing the organizational favorite Don Mattingly. Terms are still being negotiated.

Mattingly, who spent the last four seasons as a coach on Joe Torre’s staff, announced through his agent, Ray Schulte, that he would not serve in a similar capacity under Girardi. “Don will use this time to reflect on this experience while considering future family and career options,” Schulte said. “In the meantime, he did inform the Yankees that given the circumstances, he won’t accept a coaching position within the organization during 2008.”

Girardi’s elevation represents a tectonic shift in the organization. George Steinbrenner and his sons showed uncharacteristic obeisance to the chain of command, accepting their general manager’s recommendation, despite an obvious fondness for Mattingly and a tradition of selecting managers based on which one would make the biggest back page splash. Moreover, in selecting Girardi, they seemed to pay special attention not only to his experience as manager of the Marlins, but the character of that experience. In 2006, Girardi was given one of the youngest collections of pitchers in recent memory and asked to mold it into a successful major league staff. Whether he succeeded or failed is a controversial question, and it’s one that is ultimately unanswerable given the way his administration was truncated at the end of the 2006 season. Still, the main thing that differentiated Girardi from Mattingly was his greater experience as a handler of pitchers, both as a catcher and manager.

There have, of course, been many successful managers who were neither catchers nor had any special experience with young pitchers and were more focused on offense, often deferring to an experienced pitching coach when it came to matters of the mound. Mattingly, the former slugging first baseman and hitting coach, would have fit this description. His path to the manager’s office would have been almost the same as that of Lou Piniella 22 years before him.

If pitching were not the main focus of Yankees’ upper management at this time, then it’s likely Mattingly would have been the pick. His coaching represented reasonable preparation by most standards. Though fans liked Girardi, Mattingly is one of the most popular Yankees of all time. Girardi rated an edge higher when it came to media relations, coming across as polished and forthright, while Mattingly seemed tentative. That’s an important difference in the New York market, especially if you’re succeeding the polished and forthright Joe Torre (perhaps the message to Mattingly here is that the path to success goes not through the dugout, but the broadcast booth). In terms of practical, on-field management, the fork in the road represented by Mattingly vs. Girardi represented a turning from an offense-minded manager to a pitching-minded manager. This suggests that for the first time during the Steinbrenner era, the team will embrace its own young pitchers.

The Florida Marlins franchise that Girardi took over was in the midst of one of those quixotic campaigns to convince the local populace and politicos that they deserved a taxpayer-funded stadium by systematically denuding the roster of any players that would make a fan/taxpayer feel enthusiastic about supporting the team. As a result, Girardi’s team would not have Carlos Delgado, Mike Lowell, A.J. Burnett, Josh Beckett, or almost any other veterans. The team was nearly virginal. The players averaged 26 years of age, but most of the key players were younger. This was particularly true of the pitching staff, where Girardi employed 14 pitchers younger than 25 years old. The main starters were Dontrelle Willis, 24; Ricky Nolasco, 23; Scott Olsen, Josh Johnson, and Anibal Sanchez, all 22, and, in a futile gesture to veteran presence, Brian Moehler, 34. Despite their youth, Marlins starters combined for a 4.22 ERA, third-best in the NL. Removing the irredeemable Moehler and his 7.29 ERA from the equation reveals an all-youth ERA of 3.84.

That some of Girardi’s charges failed to have a successful encore to their 2006 performance does not necessarily reflect on the manager. “After Girardi” does not necessarily mean “Because Girardi.” Certainly the record does not suggest that Phil Hughes, Joba Chamberlain, and Ian Kennedy have to fear Girardi in the way that Dusty Baker’s record should have any young pitcher in the Reds organization making frantic phone calls to their agents. The one questionable decision in Girardi’s term came on September 12, 2006, when he kept young ace Josh Johnson in the game after a 1-hour, 22-minute rain delay. Johnson developed a forearm strain after the game and was sidelined for the rest of the season. He missed most of 2007 and subsequently underwent Tommy John surgery that will keep him out for all of 2008. Clearly not all of this can be attributed to Girardi’s decision, but it does seem as if it was a contributing factor to Johnson’s breakdown. The Yankees can only hope that he learned from this odd misstep. There is nothing wrong with going against the conventional wisdom, except when there is nothing to be gained from doing so.

On offense, Girardi’s Marlins ran and bunted a bit too much, a problem symptomatic of rookie managers looking to prove themselves. It also goes without saying that either Girardi will recognize the different level of tactical handholding required by Alfredo Amezaga and Derek Jeter or he is not as intelligent as advertised. That said, with the departure of Alex Rodriguez, Girardi might find that he needs to worry about offense more than Torre did at any time since 1996, when the team was limited by having (among others) Girardi in the lineup. Still, that’s a minor problem. If Girardi succeeds in transforming the Yankees’ staff from a doddering collection of fading veterans into a vibrant collection of hard-throwing youngsters, he’ll have achieved all that the Yankees hired him to do.

Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for yesnetwork.com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.