The end of an era

Joe Torre told the Yankees to take this job and shove it after receiving an offer for a 1 year deal at 2/3 of his prior salary. I can't believe there will be no more Joe Torre in the most hated dugout. If the people running that show actually believe the blame for their failure to make the World Series since 2003 lies with Torre, and not with their mismanagement of the team roster, they are truly delusional. Torre was about the best thing they had going for them all these years. This Yankee squad, the most expensive in baseball by far and laden with superstars, looked dead to rights for the first half of the season. Why? Because you can't throw together a mishmash of aged and infirm primadonna superstars and expect them to congeal into a team that plays well together. You can't have all the big bats in baseball but decrepit pitching and get it done. And you can't gut your farm system for years and then buy young pitching talent.

Now either Don Mattingly or Joe Girardi gets to prove just how good Torre was by doing an even worse job of managing the dream lineup stable minus pitching next year. That is, if most of the all-stars whose contracts are up don't opt to play elsewhere. After the first time in years that the Yankees didn't win the AL East, could we actually see a year that they don't even make the playoffs? If not for an improbable second half in which they won an astounding percentage of their games, the Yankees would have missed the playoffs altogether this year. It was probably Torre who pushed them over that threshhold and got them to push themselves so hard. I don't see a manager in his rookie season having more success than Torre would have.

Meanwhile, some other team is going to snatch up Torre so fast it will make Yankee heads spin, and it will be a very sound investment.