BALTIMORE – He has assembled quite a prodigious collection of moments and memories across a crowded baseball lifetime, but Joe Torre happened to be sitting and sweating in what is probably the single most sacred space in his professional world.
“Every time I’m here,” Torre said, looking around the third-base dugout at Camden Yards, “the same thoughts come back to me. And those are very happy thoughts.”
It was here, after all, in this dugout, on this bench, in that magical October of 1996 that Joe Torre’s life was transformed in an instant where he made the forever transition from Clueless Joe to Joe Cool.
Derek Jeter fielded a ball in the hole and whipped a throw to first that got a diving Cal Ripken Jr. by an eyelash, and suddenly the Yankees were American League champions for the first time in 15 years.
Suddenly, Joe Torre was going to the World Series without a ticket for the first time in his life.
“You don’t forget places like that,” Torre said, “and you don’t forget teams like that.”
It was instructive to remember that day, and that year, and that star-dappled Yankee team yesterday, as gray skies hung low over Baltimore and angry storm clouds gathered about 800 miles south of here, in Tampa, where a Commission-level meeting among Yankee executives took place in an effort to save the Yankees from themselves.
And here is the lesson to be culled from that: Even championship teams could use a little help. And the Yankees shouldn’t have to apologize for wanting to make their team better, just because the starting pricetag on the ballclub sits in excess of $200 million.
In fact, the only thing dumber than giving some of the more underachieving employees who comprise that payroll would be to let them try and “work things out” among themselves. The Yankees need help. They need to be fortified or risk spending three of the most nightmarish months in baseball history playing out what would be an ugly string.
They don’t need to worry about other people ripping the idea of a $208 million team making moves.
They just need to worry about making the right moves. Firing people solves nothing, not at this point. Closing your eyes and pointing a finger at the most expensive available option solves even less.
No, the Yankees have to sit back and make some smart baseball decisions now. They have to go retro, maybe go back to 1996, when the prize at the end of the rainbow was always in sight, and the desire was to make an excellent team a forever team. That’s why Cecil Fielder was brought aboard. That’s why Charlie Hayes became a Yankee, and Graeme Lloyd.
Those were old-time baseball moves that no one derided, because they made sense, and because they paid dividends later on. The David Justice deal in 2000 is another just like it. These weren’t Jose Canseco becoming a Yankee, or Raul Mondesi, or any of the other in-season moves the past few years, moves that were made mostly to prove the Yankees were capable of making them.
That shouldn’t have been the motivation in Tampa yesterday. The meeting wasn’t as long as others have been, when you half expected Steinbrenner to issue ransom notes before allowing his people to go home.
If the Yankees were smart – and that would be a nice way to go this time around – then there were actual baseball matters discussed, reasonable trades proposed, with nobody’s sacrificial head being prepared for the wolves back home.
“After 10 years, you learn,” said Torre, leaning against a wall in his favorite dugout in baseball. “You learn that the things we do as an organization are news because we’re doing it. Other teams can have meetings and nobody pays attention. It’s part of the deal here.”
And not just in bad times. Torre can surely tell you that.