Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News has his opinion on the fate of Joe Torre.
So does Gene Wojciechowski of ESPN.com.
Lupica is in favor of Lou Piniella as the new coach – Wojciechowski is in favor of keeping Torre.
They’re both wrong.
Allow me to take a different approach to this topic than the media men before me. Allow me to not talk about how much the Yankees shell out to win a World Series every year or a salary cap or anything else that’s uncontrollable right now.
Let’s get back to baseball.
Yes, I know the New York Yankees have advantage because they spend more. Yes, I get that they should be favored to win the World Series every year because they can go out and swoon good players off of lousy teams. Yes, I get that they can keep stars like Derek Jeter, because no other team can bargain the star captain off of the Bronx Bombers.
But when did everything stop being about baseball? Am I wrong in thinking that even if you assemble a group of All-Stars to play against a bunch of Little Leaguers that the All-Stars still have to lineup and beat the little tykes? Haven’t we just seen over the past few years that the USA Basketball Team (a collection of what is supposed to be some the best – and richest mind you – players America has to offer) lose in less dramatic fashion to countries like Greece?
You still have to play the game and that’s why you get Tigers 3, Yankees 1 in the playoffs and six years of New York not winning a damn thing that counts.
The next managerially move that Steinbrenner needs to make is one that unifies his bunch of overpaid All-Stars. Torre is finished in New York– he’s burned out. He doesn’t deserve to be walking on eggshells anymore with Steinbrenner and his band of thugs standing over him on every move.
Lupica said it best regarding Torre and the Detroit series in his article:
In the old days, Torre had players who motivated themselves, especially in the biggest moments. It doesn’t happen that way anymore. It wasn’t just A-Rod who shrunk to the size of a jockey this past weekend. A lot of them did, on a weekend when the Tigers looked willing to charge a machine gun nest for their manager, Jim Leyland.
The Yankees need a guy who can motivate a team to start playing baseball again. Forget the crap we hear every year from the media around postseason time: “The Yankees are not just happy to be here – they want a World Series.” These players assume, just like all of us in the world, that the Yankees are going to be given a title because of their talent and cash.
Maybe they should be “just happy to be here” again. Maybe the Yankees forgot how fortunate it is to even make the postseason in the MLB when only eight of 30 teams get in. We just witnessed the Tigers blow through a Yankee All-Star team with flare, excitement and passion.
Torre’s bunch has lost that over the years in the wake of trying to be the New York Yankees. Torre is fried out and it wasn’t more evident this past weekend.
And this certainly isn’t putting everything that happened against the Tigers on the manager. But if the Yankees looked nothing at all like the championship teams we remember against the Tigers, Torre looked nothing at all like a championship manager, especially on Friday night, when he benched Gary Sheffield – who he had put in A-Rod’s cleanup spot – and put A-Rod back at cleanup and put the guy replacing Sheffield in the order, Bernie Williams, at No. 8. All of a sudden the manager of the biggest baddest team, the coolest guy going, looked as if he had panicked. In the end, he sat there in the dugout and looked as beaten, as beat-up, as any of them.
Torre deserves to be out of the limelight that is New York.
And that is why I think the next hire should be Joe Girardi. The Yankees need the next Torre – not a Piniella stopgap for one or two years trying to only win a World Series.
Start building a franchise again and build it around a former Yankee who remembers the excitement of just being able to play in the postseason. Everybody has just witnessed what Girardi went through in Florida with a difficult owner, so he should be able to handle Steinbrenner’s intervening ways.
This situation reminds me a lot of one of the greatest baseball movies of all time: Major League 2. Remember when all of the Indian players came back after making the playoffs the previous year and started to only play for paycheck until Jake Taylor straightens them out?
Well guess what Mr. Steinbrenner? Joe Girardi is your Jake Taylor – and is there any coincidence that they were both catchers?
If Girardi isn’t your man – then hire Piniella, make your headlines and lose in the first round again next year.
Story Update: Joe a no-go in the Bronx.
