JOE MATTERS BECAUSE

Shit Happens.

Psychoanalysis tells us that whatever the status of reality an sich, our experience of the real is exhaustively determined by the frames provided by our fantasies. Analogously, our current experience of the game of baseball has been fundamentally altered, reconditioned, by the explosion in fantasy baseball. For one thing, the existence of leagues in which the game is literally played "on paper" or the virtual equivalent thereof has tended to endorse the phoney science of sabermetrics beyond anything justified by what happens on the field of dreams. I mean, sabermetric me this, what passel of context insensitive numbers can explain or could have predicted your 2006 world champions, the St. Louis Cardinals. Sabermetrics, as we know, is a discourse of the GM (and of one GM in particular, Billy Beane, who, the last time I checked, has won exactly what his discourse is worth, nothing--he's the alan Sokol of baseball, only without the irony, but maybe that's Michael Lewis's bailiwick: after all, he first became famous writing Liar's Poker not Money Ball).

A related effect of the fantasy (league) frame is to turn MLB into a GM-centric game, the way college basketball is a coach-centric game or the NFL is a QB-centric game. An admittedly important part of the game--finding, recruiting, signing, keeping and trading talent--has become the essence of the game, from the fan's perspective, because it is the aspect that they can, in their fantasy leagues, participate in fully. We now have pundits discussing who "won" the trading deadline, as if it is a game in itself, because in the fantasy world it is the game in itself. This phenomenon has in turn changed the way we think and talk about the "real" game in itself. When a team like the Yankees is stinking it up for an entire half season, all of the talk revolves around what they need in the way of additions: a new first baseman with pop, a middle reliever with an out pitch, more speed etc. All valid points of analysis, to be sure, but none provide actual solutions the way they might in a fantasy league, where the objective is to maximize your statistical load through GM-like, or GM light, decision-making. This is where the problem of baseball fundamentals becomes important: who gets the bunt down, who hits the ball to the right side, who throws to the right base, hits or misses the cut-off man,who works the walk and, most impotantly of all, when. It doesn't take the best or the most talented ballplayers to get the fundamentals right and yet you won't win over the long term if you don't. So no GM is baseball can ultimately provide for fundamentals; the next big acquisition will not solve this problem, the next brilliant move, be it a trade or a promotion from the minors won't create the team efficiency that sound fundamental baseball affords. Fundamentals are both the both the basic unit of play and the aspect of the game least amenable to outside control. They constitute a margin of irreducible difference between fantasy ball and actual ball, hence between an imagined GM-centric MLB and the real MLB, which can never be GM-centric in the end.

The point of mediation between what happens on the field, baseball as a players game, as we used to think of it, and what happens in the staging of the field itself, baseball as a GM's game, as we currently imagine it, is of course the manager. He is the proximate influence not over whether the team hits or pitches--hence the old saw that he's not responsible, he can't play the game for them--but over whether they play the game the right way, whether they do all the things they absolutely must do to win and they absolutely can do as professional athletes, if they maintain a sufficient intensity of focus and concentration--which is precisely why managers do matter so much even though they can't actually play the game.

In a fantasy Gm-centric world, Joe Torre can remain serene, as he was yesterday, that his team is enormously talented and will win in the end despite their egregious failure in every category of fundamentals. This is the manger as faux GM, which is what comes of earning your stripes as a clubhouse "presence" rather than an on-field tactician. But in the real world, where baseball is not just a sport, an athletic competition, but a game, a contest that admits of multiple ways of seeking advantage, a manager who relies on talent alone or who is negligently wastes his talent by not compelling them to do the little things they might feel are "beneath" them (like bunting) will soon be a losing manger, and then a fired manager, and finally a manager in the one league suited to his tastes and talents--fantasy baseball.

Unless of course his owner has lost the mind his GM never had. And then the manager will be left to wake up to reality on his own or to ruin the franchise.