The second best seller that I finished this week was Joe Torre and Tom Verducci's account of Joe Torre's 12 years as Yankee manager. This is not a book I would have even considered buying, but after Paul Zinn bought it and read it, he was kind enough to loan it to me. Having read it, I have to say that I don't understand why Joe Torre did this and that I have lost a great deal of respect for him for having done so.
The shocking revelation of this book is that the Steinbrenners and their coterie didn't appreciate everything that Torre did in his years as Yankee manager, offering him a degrading contract that he had no choice, but to reject. If anyone reading this is not shocked by that revelation, neither am I - that was all very clear when it happened back in October of 2007. Since it was so clear then, there doesn't seem to be much reason for this book. I will say, however, that if what Torre wanted to do this to clearly tell his side of the story and publicly criticize the owners for that treatment, it wouldn't bother me at all. I greatly appreciated Torre's comments at the time ,criticizing the idea that any Yankee season that ended without winning the World Series was a failure. That philosophy shows a lack of respect for the game, something that is very important to me.
Unfortunately the book doesn't stop there, it seems to have two further agendas, to further praise Torre's record as manager and to get back at anyone else who wasn't part of his first teams of grinders. Why anything more needs to be said about how good a job Torre did as Yankee manager is beyond me, but apparently Torre and Verducci think so. What was really incredible to me how the book tries to quantify how many games better Torre made the Yankees in at least two seasons.
In a book with constant criticism of Brian Cashman for becoming too enamoured with statistics and forgetting in Torre's words that the game "has a heart," the authors try a similar approach to confirm Torre's contribution. I forget the specific season, but the book takes the Yankees statistics for that season and use Saber metrics to determine that the Yankees should have only one X number of games. Since they actually won about a dozen more than that, the difference is obviously due to Torre - "the game has a heart indeed!"
The criticism of Cashman goes hand in hand with that of Alex Rodriguez who is clearly the anti-Christ of this story. Cashman may have let Torre down and Rodriguez may have been a disappointment, but what is the point of Torre saying so in print. After all what made Torre so appealing as a Yankee manager was that he was above that kind of the thing, a star of calmness in the chaos of the Steinbrenner galaxy. There is an old locker room cliche that "what you say here, what you do here and what you hear here, must stay here." That kind of an attitude was what made Torre admirable - team first and all that kind of thing. Why he would go against that so dramatically is a mystery - unless, however, that in spite of what Torre says, it is really about the money. The book has some appeal as an account of life on the inside of a major league team, but frankly I don't think it is worth the time or the money.
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