Joe Torre

This time, it doesn't seem like cooler heads will prevail and the remarkable Joe Torre Yankee era will come to an end sometime soon. Steve Goldman ruminates on such a move.

Joe Torre has an understanding of the politics of being the manager of the Yankees that all of his predecessors going back to Ralph Houk lacked. First, the manager doesn't own the team. Mr. Steinbrenner does. Mr. Steinbrenner's moods, whims, fetishes, fancies, are well known at this point. More has been written about George Steinbrenner than any other owner in the history of baseball. The only manager in Yankees history who can claim not to have been forewarned was Houk, who came with the franchise. Everyone else knew what they were getting into. Torre understood that if you are not prepared to accept the owner as he is then you shouldn't take the job.

He also understood that it is better to cooperate with the media than struggle against it. Those Subway commercials with Willie Randolph actually come close to capturing reality: Torre knows you have to give the media the good sandwiches. Working for the Yankees in any job is difficult. It really can be turbulent inside that Stadium. Having the media working against you can only make things harder.

Finally, he seemed to do an excellent job of forging the often overpaid, sometimes eccentric, collection of Derek Jeters and Ruben Sierras into a winning whole. I say "seemed" because we don't get to see that part of his job. We only get to hear about it from him and some of the people involved. We have to take their word for it.

Torre is a rotten tactician, though watching opposing managers I suspect he pulls fewer rocks than the average skipper. Despite this, when I consider the list of managers above and contemplate the alternatives — Joe Girardi, who lost his job in Florida because he clashed with the front office and yelled at the owner? Lou Piniella, who maneuvered himself into the Tampa Bay job and then spent three years bitching about the club? — I can see the Yankees taking a step back into a less rational time.

Still, Torre's day may be at an end. All managers, even the great ones, reach a point where they have been in one place too long, gotten too comfortable, too satisfied with their own judgments, too predictable with the players to keep them motivated.

Maybe so. I started rooting for the Yankees when Buck Showalter was manager, and I was horrified when he was fired after the '95 season and replaced by Joe Torre. Torre has now managed the Yankees for 11 straight years -- an unbelievable accomplishment when the team's owner is named Steinbrenner.

In the 1990s Torre's ability to manage a series of overproducing teams, especially 1998 (maybe the best team of all time) had much to do with his players' loyalty to him and the climate he created in which the players were responsible for policing the club house and were expected to succeed. In this decade, though, it seems that Torre -- so lauded for his ability to manage his roster of superstars -- has labored to manage under the ridiculous pressure that comes with having a roster of superstars, one through nine. Ridiculous pressure especially in light of the fact that when you bring superstars to a team, well, that means the superstars have probably already seen their best years (ironically, in the Yankees' case, Alex Rodriguez is the exception to that rule). Even more ridiculous pressure when some of those superstars are pitchers who are nothing more than veteran cheese or just so much meat.

But maybe that pressure finally got to him. Something seemed to have snapped this year with Torre. It was evident when the SI hit piece came out about Rodriguez. Like Steve Goldman, I thought the piece said more about Joe Torre and Jason Giambi than it did Rodriguez. About Giambi it said, here's a player that is only a year removed from his BALCO testimony and nearly being released by the Yankees, yet he thought he could act as chief spokesman for "fixing Rodriguez." And about Joe, it said that he had so little regard for a player one year removed from the MVP that he would do something entirely unthinkable in the past: air a clubhouse issue in the glaring light of the media. It was not lost on me that there were a couple of notable players who did not offer opinions on Rodriguez -- Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada.

And worse, the article came out when Rodriguez had escaped from the awful slump he was going through when Verducci was doing his reporting. He was hitting again when the story hit the newsstands, but once again the focus was back, negatively, on Rodriguez and on his relationship with his teammates.


It seemed at the time that, by letting Verducci in on the dirty laundry, Torre was admitting that he not only didn't know how to manage Rodriguez, but that he was frustrated by that and close to giving up.

Batting him eighth on Saturday reinforced that.

I don't want to see Torre go. No one's guaranteed the job for life, but he's earned a chance to recover from this awful end to a season. A season, mind you, that was fun, exciting, and improbable. In May, I didn't think the Yankees would even make the postseason. They lost Sheffield and Matsui that month. They lost Robinson Cano just before the all-star break and he didn't return for six weeks. Torre did a masterful job of putting a lineup together each day and finding a way to win 97 games. Hell, I think he should win AL manager of the year, though, obviously, it's going to Jim Leyland. Moreover, I don't really like the alternatives -- the idea of Pinella bothers me.

But someone is going to take the fall for the debacle in Detroit, and I can understand if Steinbrenner decides it's going to be Torre.