LIT FOR LIVING: Damn Yankees

It must be nice being Joe Torre these days—nice not to have to get mad, but merely even.

After managing the Yankees to twelve straight post-season appearances and four world championships, the Yankee brass rewarded all this success by offering Torre a lukewarm, one-year contract that included insulting performance-incentive clauses; Torre’s compensation would be tied to just how far his team progressed through the post-season, as if he somehow wasn’t trying hard enough once his team reached the playoffs. Torre had finally had enough. He said Thanks, but no thanks, and walked away after the 2007 season from one of the highest profile jobs in all of sports.

Former Yankees catcher Joe Girardi, who once played for Torre, replaced him as manager, and Torre moved out west to manage the Los Angeles Dodgers. In 2008, Girardi’s Yankees finished a dismal third place in the American League East, the men in pinstripes failing to make it to the post-season for the first time since 1996, when Torre had taken the helm. Torre’s Dodgers, on the other hand, won the National League West for the first time in four years and went all the way to the National League Championship Series. Now Torre can be spotted starring in his own national State Farm Insurance commercial, in which he’s shown driving around his new city in a Mercedes convertible while talking about his latest screenplay, yucking it up at a yoga class, and even surfing. Can you spell R-E-D-E-M-P-T-I-O-N?

Since Torre has been vindicated, and since money can hardly be a motivating factor, it’s not immediately clear why he would feel the need to come out with a tell-all book. Few, after all, would question his integrity, his reputation, or his record. But perhaps Torre wanted to set the record straight once and for all. After holding his tongue all these years—always taking the high road despite having to weather the often very public tirades of a demanding owner—it’s positively liberating for the unusually discreet Torre to let it all hang out. Torre, as it turns out, is seeking closure.

There were some, and apparently these included important decision makers in the Yankees camp, who felt that Torre deserved little credit for whatever success his teams achieved. He was more than occasionally perceived as someone who managed the most talented team put on the field, and that given such an advantage, it’d be hard to mess it up. While The Yankee Years, by Torre and frequent Sports Illustrated contributor Tom Verducci, who also worked on a previous book with Torre called Chasing the Dream, covers more ground than Bernie Williams once did in center field, its pervading theme is that managing the Yankees was anything but easy. Having the highest payroll in baseball hardly guarantees the best team, let alone winning with any regularity, and yet Torre, when with the Yankees, was able to do just that year after year, despite in recent years failing to garner the ultimate prize by winning yet another World Series.

There exists a mythology that the championship Yankees teams under Torre operated on autopilot, blissfully riding their talent and their will to preordained titles. No team requires no care. Even the most beautiful garden in the world, as amazed and occupied as we might be by its natural beauty, is the work of hours of pruning and weeding and feeding and fastidious attention to detail.

Torre’s defense of why his later Yankees teams came up short of the title includes everything from the poor and injury-prone starting pitching staff to the cloud of bugs that suddenly appeared and distracted the usually reliable relief pitcher Joba Chamberlain, helping to end the Yankees playoff run against Cleveland in 2007 (and the death knell for Torre, as it turned out).
 

This, of course, sets up longtime general manager Brian Cashman as the fall guy (along with the underperforming Alex Rodriguez). Cashman comes off as not only a betraying weasel, but an incompetent one at that. Blame is cast on Cashman for failing to develop prospects from within the Yankees organization in favor of overly relying upon the ever-decreasing and less reliable free-agent market, as evidenced by his frequent signings of aging pitchers such as Kevin Brown, Randy Johnson, and Roger Clemens.
 

But more than just a settling of scores, The Yankee Years recounts the tentative, precarious start of Torre’s managerial tenure with the Yankees (when he was, in fact, the organization’s fourth choice for the job, after nearly two decades of managing, including stints with the New York Mets, the St. Louis Cardinals, and the Atlanta Braves) to four thrilling world championships in his first five years to his public battle with prostate cancer to Alex Rodriguez, whose recent steroid saga grabbed all those New York Post and Daily News headlines just after the book first came out.
 

The behind-the-scenes drama hardly ends here—let’s not forget the other major player in all this, the one-time towering owner (and Williams College alumnus) George Steinbrenner, all but a shuffling ghost of his former self by the time of Torre’s rude dismissal, the team now controlled by others. But there’s also an awful lot of baseball to talk about and rehash. Mixed in with all the infighting, the dirt about players using performance-enhancing drugs, and various power struggles is some of the most dramatic baseball ever played on this planet. Baseball played as it should be by unlikely heroes, such as Aaron Boone hitting the Sox-killing home run in game seven of the 2003 AL Championship Series. Other key players remembered fondly by Torre include: Paul O’Neill, Tino Martinez, Scott Brosius, Jorge Posada, Bernie Williams, David Cone, the remarkable, elegant, still active Mariano Rivera, and, of course, Derek Jeter, who has been the one constant throughout, having built a reputation on dependable consistency but also on making the memorable play in the memorable situation in so many instances. For Red Sox fans, it’s never easy giving the Yankees their due, but these damn Yankees, under Torre’s calm, unflappable, and classy leadership, were something to behold. It’s bittersweet to think that, like Torre himself, all but a few have since moved on, seeking their own peace and closure as best they can in places far removed from the Bronx cheers. (JUNE 2009)

Managing editor Chris Newbound’s greatest baseball fan moment came at the infamous Red Sox-Mets World Series Game Six in 1986 at Shea Stadium, when, as a Mets fan, he watched Mookie Wilson’s ground ball go through Bill Buckner’s wobbly legs.
 

THE GOODS

The Yankee Years

By Joe Torre and Tom Verducci

Doubleday

www.doubleday.com