This isn’t the Yankees. Joe Girardi needs to prove he can make the Phillies a winner. | Bob Brookover

It is the most tenuous of jobs. You are hired to be fired and if the fan base doesn’t like you from the start, it’s an uphill battle that can be fleeting even when it’s won.

Doug Pederson has plenty of time these days to tell you all about it.

Joe Girardi at least had the benefit of being fully embraced at his introductory news conference as Phillies manager. He checked all the boxes for managing partner John Middleton and the fan base.

A proven winner? Check.

A demanding demeanor? Check.

An old-school guy willing to listen to the analytics department? Check.

Not Gabe Kapler? Quadruple check.

But now it’s a year later. Not only is the honeymoon over, it also was not all that romantic or rewarding.

It’s important to remember what Middleton said after he took 10 days to fire Kapler following the 2019 season: “I felt if I was going to bring Gabe back, I had to be very, very confident we were going to have a different outcome in 2020. I kept bumping up … to the September collapses. I couldn’t get comfortable or confident enough that if I brought him back we wouldn’t run into other problems, and therefore I made the decision I did.”

» READ MORE: Joe Girardi on his many years in the game

Kapler’s Phillies went 20-36 in his two Septembers. In 2018, the team was 10 games over .500 entering September and two games out of first place. They went 8-20 in September and finished 10 games behind the NL East champion Atlanta Braves. The following season, they were 69-65 heading into September and 3½ games out of the second wild-card spot. They went 12-16 in September and finished eight games out of the wild card.

The playoff system for Girardi’s first season in Philadelphia was much more forgiving, thanks to a format that expanded the field from five to eight teams for each league. For the first time in baseball history, a winning record was not required to get into the postseason, and still the Phillies could not end a playoff drought that now stands at nine seasons.

At 15-15 heading into September of the shortest season in baseball history, the Phillies stood tied for fifth with Miami and St. Louis in the eight-team playoff race. They went 13-17 in September and lost seven of their final eight games when just one more win would have put them in the playoffs.

More disturbing was the fact that the bullpen was the biggest culprit in the team’s downfall and it did not matter one bit that the relief corps had a major overhaul in the middle of the 60-game season. The ‘pen had a 7.09 ERA through the Aug. 31 trade deadline and a 7.04 ERA with the addition of four veteran relievers in September.

In his 10 seasons as the New York Yankees manager, Girardi never had a bullpen with a season-ending ERA above 4.00. The combined ERA of his bullpen during his tenure in New York was 3.58. It helped tremendously that he had Mariano Rivera as his closer for more than half of those 10 years and Aroldis Chapman during his final two years, but Girardi also brilliantly managed the bridge to his closers with the Yankees.

With the Phillies last season, he handed grenades instead of baseballs to his relievers and watched games blow up.

“I put it on me,” Girardi said on the final day of last season. “I didn’t get the most out of our bullpen and we tried.”

» READ MORE: Phillies managing partner John Middleton believes in Joe Girardi’s winning pedigree

The manager spoke more about the bullpen’s failures in the offseason.

“I really believe that we could have told the hitters what was coming and it wouldn’t have turned out as bad as it did,” Girardi said. “It was just one of those years where nothing seemed to go right. And it wasn’t like we just had a bunch of kids that had never experienced anything. These were guys who were experienced and had success and it just didn’t go right.”

Now, thanks to new team president Dave Dombrowski, there’s a new batch of arms in Girardi’s bullpen with free-agent addition Archie Bradley as the headliner.

This much we know for sure: If the bullpen and the ballclub fail again in 2021, more fingers than just his own will be pointed in the manager’s direction.

Girardi, of course, knows the deal. This is a man who was once fired a few days after his first season as manager of the Florida Marlins even though he’d be named the National League manager of the year 44 days later. Talk about a tough business.

Eleven seasons later, he had the Yankees within a win of being back in the World Series only to lose the final two games of the American League Championship Series to the cheating, trash-can thumping Houston Astros. Twenty-three days later, he was fired by general manager Brian Cashman.

You want more proof that it is the most tenuous of jobs? When Girardi reported to Clearwater, Fla., for his first season as Phillies manager last February, he was the newest face in charge of Philadelphia’s four major sports franchises. As he prepares to conduct Wednesday’s first workout for pitchers and catchers at the Carpenter Complex, Girardi has already moved up to No. 2 on that totem pole. Only the Flyers’ Alain Vigneault has been at his job longer.

» READ MORE: As the Phillies aim to improve their defense, Joe Girardi is content with Didi Gregorius’ glove | Extra Innings

In Year 2, the pressure gets turned up and Girardi knows all about that, too. The Yankees failed to make it to the postseason in his first season as manager after qualifying for 13 straight years before that, most of them under Hall of Fame manager Joe Torre. Before his second season, the Yankees spent $423.5 million to bring in CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett, and Mark Teixeira as free agents and they won the World Series.

The Phillies did not give Girardi that kind of gift for his second season, but they did spend $156.5 million on free agents J.T. Realmuto, Didi Gregorius, and Bradley. Only the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays have spent more in free agency than the Phillies this offseason, according to spotrac.com.

That means Girardi has been dealt a pretty good hand by Dombrowski and Middleton. It also means the pressure is on to prove he can win as a manager someplace other than the Bronx.