BY simply answering the question about how well he handles crises, Joe Torre revealed precisely why he is so good at handling crises. I wanted to know if Torre, as a young manager, had been as good at defusing difficulties as he’s become as an older manager.
He smiled.
“What makes you think,” he said, “that I’m any good at it now?”
Only Torre’s whole body of work as Yankees manager, going all the way back to his first summer on the job, in 1996, when the team was in a free fall, when it looked like the Yankees were going to blow a big lead in the A.L. East and everything that had been feared about Torre as a manager were proving prophetic. Torre refused to explode, refused to implode, refused to let his players panic or tighten.
And only Torre’s whole body of work since the start of the weekend, when warning flares were splashing in the skies all around Shea Stadium, when the sharks were circling and the troubles were broiling, and when one more time, during one more flashpoint, he chose the calm, reasonable path over the rash, visceral, over-the-top lane. It didn’t salvage the season, not yet, not even after Sunday’s humbling of the Mets, or after last night’s 6-2 win over the Red Sox kicking off an important three-game series at Yankee Stadium.
But it does reinforce why now, more than ever, even as the vapor-lock grip he held on Yankees fans’ loyalties for so long seems to be loosening, Torre is the right man to manage this team.
“You have to have a belief system in place,” Torre said. “You have to believe in what you have as a team. And mostly, you have to believe that you haven’t forgotten how to handle things properly the way you’ve done them your whole life.”
While the alarmists and the dread-brokers have been peddling their version of the pending apocalypse – a plan that almost always includes a change in the manager’s office these days – Torre has remained Torre. Maybe that’s easy to do when you’re 66 years old and have already assembled a Hall of Fame managing resume, when the worst thing that can happen if you do get fired are a couple of extra weeks in Hawaii.
But the truth is, that’s been Torre’s way his whole managing career. With the Mets, when the sky not only seemed to be falling every few weeks but really was falling, he was the same way. And those Mets, with an owner who wondered why you couldn’t just re-wash used baseballs, were operated with significantly less bottom-line backing than these Yankees are.
“The losing would get to guys,” Lee Mazzilli once said of Torre’s tenure with the Mets. “But Joe would never make guys feel worse than they did. And he had plenty of opportunities to do that.”
We have had the extra benefit of looking through the looking glass the past few weeks, too, getting a glance at what we’d be in store for if Torre had been fired last October, or if he gets fired in the weeks and months to come.
We saw Don Mattingly serve a one-day apprenticeship in the manager’s chair, and while you can’t make final judgments about the way a man occupies a seat that doesn’t yet belong to him, it was clear Mattingly isn’t yet ready to move up the depth chart. He just isn’t.
We got a full-blown performance of the Lou Piniella Follies last week at Shea, an over-the-top revue that included plenty of rolled eyes, plenty of dropped F-bombs, plenty of shown-up players and plenty of burned-up relief pitchers. It isn’t only Yankees fans who can breath a sigh of relief that Sweet Lou is in Chicago; Mets fans should never forget the Piniella-for-Jose-Reyes deal that was on the table with the Mariners five years ago.
It’s also helpful to remember that as good as Joe Girardi was last year, as good as he will be again when he gets his next crack at managing, the biggest reason he isn’t managing this year is because he couldn’t get along with a quirky owner. Joe Torre? He can. He does. He has for 12 seasons, and he still does.
As well as the job can be done.