No Really, F*&! Joe Torre

One day after winning the kind of game (4-3) to which their new line-up would, with the right pitching and proper management, be suited, the Yankees were bitten in the ass today by their two biggest bugaboos, bad fielding and atrocious field management. The gift of glove came by way of Robinson Cano, who on a single play, botched a slow roller and threw the ball away allowing 2 runs to score. Cano had made great strides in the field of late, so while you hate to see thiss kind of relapse, you are also inclined to absolve. Not so for the man who is rapidly becoming not just the most overrated manager in baseball, but a serious competitor for the worst. By some miracle, Torre got 6 fine, scoreless innings out of Jared Wright, and one would think he might be counting his blessings (or miracles) and having Guidry put a call into the pen when the 7th started, particularly since Wright had shown signs of weakening in recent frames. No? Okay. But when Mench starts the inning with a solid single, surely slow Joe invokes the protocol for starters pulling at the tether and slow walks himself out there to pull him. No? Okay, but when Wilkerson hits one out to put the Rangers up 2-0, Torre can at least see the damage his passivity has cost the team and act to limit it. But he doesn't. He lets Wright, who was clearly done at this point, put another man on by HBP, and then Torre, apparently roused from an afternoon siesta, comes out into the air and brings in who, Erickson, the absolute bottom feeder in his bullpen, the man with a 7.36 era, the man who makes Scott Procter look like Rollie Fingers and Sparky Lyle rolled into one. This is a game, remember, still very much there for the taking, a game still available to a grinding strategy in the late innings, and Torre brings in someone sure to allow it to get completely out of reach, which of course is exactly what Erickson does. He acts as a turnstile not only for Wright's man on base but for three more. Then, once th game is essentially over Torre brings in Villone. If you were willing to pitch the better man, why not do it when the game was still within reach, i. e. when the 2 runs the Yankees pushed across in the bottom of the 7th would have knotted things. Do you realize how good the chances of the home team winning when tied in the eighth are? Torre is simply a manager for whom there has become no excuse. Now that he has lost Sturtze to injury and so lost a golden oppurtinity opportunity to blow games the Yankees stand every chance of winning, he goes out and finds somebody even worse. Ericson is, as BGW might have it, Joe's sentimental, commemorative tribute to Tanyon Sturtze's futility.

Speaking of futile figures for whom there is no excuse, Carl Pavano claims to be injured yet again, just as his rehabilitation promised to afford Yankee fans the inestimable honor of seeing at last the return of the world's wussiest athlete. After just nine pitches the other night, he felt "soreness" in his forearm and now he claims he can't straighten out his arm. Beyond the obvious point that it is his head that needs the straightening, one must say that this long into an expensive comedy of nueresthenic disabilty, Pavano should be given a cocktail of cortisone, anti-inflammatories, advil and, if necessary some Class A narcotic like DiLauda, and dragged kicking and screaming to the mound to pitch, even if its only daily batiing practice. That way they'd get some use out of him, plus they'd make him a spectacle for the fans to take out their frustrations on.