Why Fire Joe Torre?
October 10, 2007 – 9:08 pmI’m content that I’ll never get to the bottom of the morass of issues surrounding Joe Torre’s situation with the Yankees. But I can’t help thinking, why fire Joe Torre?
What’s the one, primary job a manager has? To put his players in the best possible position to succeed. Don’t get me wrong, the manager has other responsibilities, but the primary one is to help his players succeed. How has Joe Torre not put his players in optimal positions? Has he misused his pitching staff? Was his batting order imperfect? What game management miscues did he make?
I don’t get it. He makes all the right moves. He’s a calming influence on the team with the most chaotic off-field situation in baseball year in and year out. The biggest free agents available say his departure makes them less likely to play for the Yankees.
I certainly understand it’s frustrating to lose in the first round of the playoffs in three consecutive years. I also appreciate it’s frustrating to have gone seven years without a World Series. But is in-game management the culprit here? What about a flawed roster? What about players who are repeatedly put in game-changing situations and repeatedly fail to produce? How is that Joe Torre’s fault?
I have a strong dislike for the Yankees, so I don’t really care what they do. But Joe Torre seems like a very decent and respectful man, and it’s a shame that a flawed Yankees organization is making him out to be the scapegoat when I just don’t think it’s his doing.
One Response to “Why Fire Joe Torre?”
Hey Jeff, this is my take on the Joe Torre firing. (By the way, I kind of forgot you had a blog, but Bobby reminded while I was eating his food and drinking his beer last night. Now I’m drinking his coffee.) Never having managed a baseball team, I do not know exactly what it involves, but motivating one’s players must be as important as anything else, and probably is what separates many successful managers from others. Managing their chemistry as much as the game, and I think it is apparent Torre did not do a very good job of that. The Yankees have tried to accumulate the best players in baseball because winning the World Series is their only goal. They have failed despite the most expensive and perhaps best team in baseball for the last 6 seasons. I don’t think that that is necessarily Torre’s fault, but obviously if winning the Series is your aim, I think some change needs to be made. You could get rid of players, which is happening to some degree, but who do you replace them with? You’re only option is young talent and worse players. If you want to win every single championship, than only the former makes sense, but they have always done that, and for next year that would mean a significantly different pitching staff, probably bbetter, and probably not as good a lineup because A-Rod is gone, and I fully expect Posada to have a worse season. I think the Yankees had the option of maintaining status quo which hasn’t worked hoping they could ride young pitching to the championship, or try a new manager, and they got probably a very good one. And he has made game managing mistakes, very famously in the bug game this last series, he has not been a perfect manager. Again, though, I don’t necessarily think they Yankees failure has been to poor game management, but more to them not playing to their potential and not having as good of pitching as other teams. The Manager is partially responsible for the former. Finally, and most importantly, he wasn’t fired, he was offered an enormous contract, still about 1.5 million more than the next highest paid manager in baseball, with the possibility of gettting paid even more than he did this season if they won the pennant. Not bad even without considering that that team will almost certainly make the playoffs no matter who is in charge.
By 2ndGenerationBonxResidentandyankeefan on Nov 2, 2007 at 9:43 am