NEW YORK -- Joe Girardi should go ahead and play the field, maybe secure a couple of offers, and take his competing bids back to his employer. Just about everyone in every profession makes the best business deal he or she can, and those same terms of engagement should apply to the manager of a big league team.

Even when that team is the world famous New York Yankees, a franchise with a long history of being the dumper rather than the dumped.

But unless his hometown Chicago Cubs or the Washington Nationals make him a life-changing offer the Yankees can't or won't approach -- and there's almost no chance of that happening -- Girardi would be a fool to walk away from the best job in the sport, especially at a time when his bosses are forever taking sane, even-tempered surveys of his work.

Consider what an in-his-prime George Steinbrenner would be thinking of Girardi right about now. Joe Torre made five trips to the World Series in his first six years in the Bronx, prevailing in four of them. Torre's successor has made one trip to the World Series (a winning one) in his first six years in the Bronx, and is about to officially miss the postseason for the second time.

Mariano Rivera will lose the pinstripes next season, but it's in Joe Girardi's best interest to keep wearing them. AP Photo/Kathy Willens

Devastating injuries or no devastating injuries, there's no way the Boss would be offering Girardi anything but a ride in the kind of white limo that once whisked away the fired Bucky Dent from the scene of his greatest conquest, Fenway Park.

But all of baseball knows by now that Hal Steinbrenner isn't George Steinbrenner. The bad news for Yankee fans: Hal doesn't like to spend quite like his old man. The good news for Yankee managers: Hal doesn't make impetuous decisions for the sake of making impetuous decisions.

The son likes Girardi, and believes in him, and believes that the team's failure to reach the postseason for only the second time since the 1994 players' strike -- again, both on Girardi's watch -- would've been prevented if one or two highly-compensated stars remained upright.

Below Hal, Randy Levine likes Girardi a lot more than the team president ever liked Torre. Below Levine, Brian Cashman hand-picked Girardi as Torre's replacement and told ESPNNewYork.com as far back as early June that he wants his pending free agent to return for 2014 and beyond.

"We picked the right guy in Joe Girardi," Cashman said then. "It's an almost impossible task to replace Joe Torre; just look at what happened in Los Angeles when they had to replace Phil Jackson. It's hard to replace iconic, Hall of Fame people, but Joe Girardi came in and did it without being Joe Torre, media darling, and that's a huge feather in his cap."