Mike Celizic

The Yankees spent nearly 15 years burying their Bronx Zoo image and recreating themselves as baseball high society, all plutocratic class and dignity. Joe Girardi’s managed to pretty much rub out all those years in less than a month.

In case you haven’t noticed, Girardi is not running for any nice guy awards, and neither is his team. The man came to New York with a reputation for being wired like a wolverine on crank. That may have been an understatement.

Here’s how intense he is: He cares about exhibition games.

We saw that last week when his no-more-Mr.-Nice-Guy Yankees got into a brawl with the team formerly called the Devil Rays. Girardi justified it by saying the Rays started it, which is technically correct. But he was awfully ticked off about the Rays playing aggressively and he didn’t wait for the regular season to get even. In the process he and a couple of coaches got fined and two players were suspended. That’s like answering a kick in the shin with a hand grenade.

But that’s Girardi. He’s the guy who won Manager of the Year with the Marlins and then got fired before he’d had time to find a place on the mantle to put the trophy. That’s intense.

I am not for a moment suggesting this is a bad thing, at least not for baseball and not for Yankee fans. Quite frankly, the Yankees needed to mainline some adrenaline after 12 years of the phlegmatic Joe Torre.

For one thing, Torre didn’t care about winning spring training games. If it weren’t for the Boss watching from the owner’s box with his finger hovering over the dugout speed-dial number, when Torre managed the Yankees, he would have been perfectly happy if he never won a game in March.

Spring training was for grooving swings, building up arm strength, getting ready for the season, when the Yankees were expected to play like professionals without any rah-rah stuff from the manager’s office. Girardi’s defining characteristic is intensity. Torre’s was sensitivity.

Torre is to sensitive managers what the Rolling Stones are to rock bands. He went through a dozen seasons like a Miss America contestant, wishing peace on all the world and weeping every time he saw a puppy. The players loved him as they would an indulgent grandparent and were devastated to see him go. Who wouldn’t feel the same way? You could no more dislike the guy than you could a plate of your mama’s lasagna.

But there’s something wrong in the universe when the Yankees are nice guys. Sure, they were still hated, but it was more out of habit. You hated them because that’s what you grew up doing. But the hate no longer came with the taste of bile that you remembered from years past.

Girardi is already showing signs of being able to stimulate bile production. He all but went postal when the Rays’ Elliot Johnson crashed into Yanke catcher Francisco Cervelli on a play at the plate. Cervelli, a back-up, broke his wrist on the play, and Girardi accused the Rays of playing too hard.

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The next time the teams played, the Yankees somehow understood that it was time to get even, and Shelley Duncan did the dirty work with a slide into second with his spikes so high they almost caught a fan in the second deck. The predictable brawl followed, after which the commissioner’s office handed out fines and suspensions.

That was followed by a braying tirade by the new owner-in-chief, Hank Steinbrenner, who spends a lot of time whining about how much more money he spends than everybody else.

And it’s about time the madness returned to the Bronx. I don’t know if all this intensity is going to lead to a more competitive team, but I do know that it will lead to a lot more fun over the six months of the baseball season.

With any luck, Yankee pitchers will start throwing inside and knocking people down, opposing players will start charging the mound, and the owner will bellow about how everybody picks on his team. And when the team hit a rough spell, the manager will close the clubhouse doors and we’ll be able to hear through the door the dulcet sounds of furniture hitting the walls.

The tabloids will love it, the fans will love it, baseball will love it. You won’t have to remind yourself that you hate the Yankees because of things they did 20 years ago. You an hate them for what they did last night.

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