A Joe Less Deserving than Shoeless

Gary Gillette, psuedo-sports journalist (are there any other kind?), writes in USA Today: "Joe Torre will go down as one of the greatest managers of all time, whether he wins another world series or not." Actually I doubt old Joe will ever rank with John McGraw or Connie Mack or Joe McCarthy or Miller Huggins or Casey Stengel or Walter Alston or Whitey Herzog or Leo Durocher or even Billy Martin, when it comes to field generalship. If Torre makes the Hall and with it the managerial pantheon--and I suppose he will--it will be based on the perception that he, like Phil Jackson of Bulls/Lakers fame, performed the at once delicate but onerous task of handling enormous talent and equally enormous egos without significant melt down or implosion. I hold this mode of canonization highly suspect. Why is it when a team plays poorly because they are either unmotivated or just plain untalented, sportswriters rue the inevitable firing of the manager as an unjust expediency--"They only fired him because they can't fire the players." But when a manager like Torre is fortunate enough to preside over an enormously skilled and motivated team, he gets substantial credit for their achievements. If managers are to reach the Hall of Fame, it should be because they show themselves master tacticians, brilliant handlers of personnel--starters, bullpens, pinch hitters--not because they happen to draw the best team. Joe Torre had, I freely admit, one Hall of Fame year, 1996, when he piloted a team that had no business winning a world championship to the promised land through a simply brilliant deployment of his bullpen and an equally inspired use of his bench. He also brought small ball back to the Yankees that season and then promptly forgot about through the fat years, 1998-2000, and back into the lean.

When Torre does take his underearned place in the Hall, however, it won't be for 1996 in particular but for the dynasty of the late 90's, which it will doubtless be noted, to his credit, had no superstars or, if we're being honest, one or two. Yes, the absence of superstars on the Dynasty teams will undoubtedly redound to Torre's glory, separating him in the vulgar minds of the sportswriting public from the whole Phil Jackson phenomenon. But superstars or not, the Yankees of those years were simply overloaded with talent at every position, throughout the starting rotation and deep into the bullpen. Their aggregate talent was much higher than say the world champion Braves of 1957, who had four hall of famers or the 1967 Orioles, who had three, or the 1980 Phillies, who also had three, or even the early seventies dynasty A's, who have three and counting. On the greatest of the Yankee teams, 1998, only two future hall of famers played, Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera, Boggs having departed and Clemens having not yet arrived. But Joe Torre was not in any way responsible for "squeezing" talent out of the likes of Paul O'Neill, Bernie Williams, Tino, Pettite, David Cone, Knoblach, Brosius, Nelson, and Boomer. These were all quite gifted players, sub Hall to be sure, but in their numbers an incredibly formidable crew to have at one's disposal. And if Torre didn't make these guys great--Paul O'Neill won a batting title before Torre came on board; Cone was an ace for other teams; Tino was great as a Mariner and Knoblach had his best years in Minnesota--then the fact that none of them will ever be in the Hall, should give one pause as to whether Torre should ascend these particular heights on their efforts. This is an instance of what we might call managerial surplus value--the middle-manger securing the profits from the efforts on the floor, or field. If you beleive Torre had more to do with the dynasty than Paul O'Neill, Bernie Williams, Andy Pettite or David Cone--more to do with 1998 than David Wells--than you probably believe he belongs in the Hall. But if you believe they, who will never be in Cooperstown, and by rights should not be there, were more instrumental to those dynastic achievements than the man who sat and watched, then you should reject the conventional wisdom of conventional minds like Gillette, Gammons and Phillips, and reject his candidacy outright.