Managing the New York Yankees is one of the most prestigious positions in all of baseball. So when the Yankees decided to hire a man who had little managerial success and an under-.500 record, the media and fans were understandably upset. The papers were littered with headlines like "Clueless Joe" and projected a young Yankees team to struggle.
Then Joe Torre led them to a World Series victory.
And then three more.
Torre was an old-school manager with a National-League mentality. The Yankees would bunt and they would hit sacrifice flies. They would move runners into scoring position. They played small ball. Watching them execute the hit-and-run in 1998 was like watching a sunrise. It was beautiful. It was natural. Everyday, you knew it was coming, but there was nothing you could do to stop it.
But in 2001, the sun stopped rising. The Yankees underwent a massive roster overturn in the new millennium. Tino, O'Neill, Brosius and Knoblauch were gone, replaced by the likes of Jason Giambi and Alfonso Soriano. Suddenly, the Yankees had a power offense. They stopped playing small ball. Joe no longer called plays like the hit-and-run from the dugout. In fact, Joe stopped looking interested in the game altogether. He just sat and slouched on the bench with his chin in his chest. Heck, if you put a pair of sunglasses on the guy, there would be no feasible way to tell whether he still had a pulse.
To make matters worse, not only had Joe lost his magic with the hit-and-run, but his management of the pitching staff and bullpen can be described with only one word: senility.
In 2004, Torre used an aging Tom Gordon to pitch almost 90 innings out of the pen, more than he had ever thrown as a reliever. Gordon was clearly fatigued in September and struggled in the playoffs. That same year, Torre used Paul Quantrill for 95 regular season innings. Quantrill went on to pitch 60 ineffective innings the next year and was never heard from again.
Over the past two seasons, Torre found a new whipping boy in Scott Proctor, using him for a whopping 156 innings in only one and a half seasons before he was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers. Determined to ruin another reliever's career, Torre left the Yanks and followed Proctor to LA. Ok, maybe those weren't the exact circumstances, but we can all agree on one thing: God help you, Scott Proctor.
Now, let's not take this whole column the wrong way. Joe Torre is a Yankee legend. He made the playoffs every year, won four rings and was an all-around class act. But by the end, he clearly was a few eggs short of a dozen.
Now, the Yankees have a new Joe. And even though the season hasn't even started yet, you can tell that things are going to be different this year. Only pitchers and catchers have reported, but Joe Girardi is already running spring training like boot camp.
"That was more running in one day than we did all of last year," Mike Mussina told the New York Post's Joel Sherman last week. Maybe this year Moose won't compile an ERA on the wrong side of five.
There's a reason Girardi won Manager of the Year despite compiling a losing record with the Marlins in 2006. He gets the most out of his players. He was a maestro with a young Marlins pitching staff, and he made his players take every at-bat seriously. In other words, his team came to play.
Joe may have relatively little managerial experience, but he's an old-school manager with a National-League mentality. Now, what happened the last time we had a guy like that?
David Heck is a sophomore who has not yet declared a major. He can be reached at David.Heck@tufts.edu.
