TAKING IT PERSONAL

Watching Slow Joe's news conference today (what manager holds a nationally covered news conference on the occasion of his firing?), I realized that I came to my present place of employment the same year Torre took over the Yankees and what is more the professional arc of my department uncannily mapped onto the arc of the Yankees fortunes. Perhaps that is why I have in recent years felt so keenly tied to them. For both organizations there was in the early to mid nineties an influx of new blood, the rush of a sense of shared purpose, and a corresponding rise to excellence. We were never able to live the Steinbrenner doctrine; we were never the world champs in our particular line of intellectual endeavor. But we became pretty good as a group; I venture to say very good. And then just about the time the Yankees started their long slow slide into underachievement, we experienced something of the same lapse into intellectual complacency, self satisfaction, and a sense of grievance against the very expectations we had helped to create for ourselves. We were still good, just like the Yankees; we may have evne become better on paper, just like the Yankees. But we had lost our edge, on a collective basis, in the professional field itself. We started to make decisions that violated the very principles of our own improvement. We catered to the Giambi's and the AROD's of the world, to the aura at the expense of the substance of excellence. And from this dual narrative skein, I derived one lesson about professional organizations:



1. Nothing corrodes guiding principles

2. Nothing imperils standards

3 Nothing produces the stench of hypocrisy



quite like the fetishism of personality.



Watching Joe field the questions of those fawning reporters, watching GM loser Steve Phillips and blowhard extraordinaire John Kruk trip all over their own tongues in describing the Yankees offer to Torre as an "insult," a 5 million dollar, elevator claused insult, a contract paying him 40% more per annum than any other manager in the game, but an insult, I realized as if for the first time that Torre has come to stand at the very center of the Yankee cult of personality. He manages the media so well they all say. Yes, indeed, much better than he manages the ballclub, and it is after all the media that can elevate your personality beyond the bounds of the office you hold or the part you play. As Torre himself said, self-described baseball haters were coming up to him in the streert and telling him they hoped he stayed, indicating that his purchase on the job now had startlingly little to do with the actual requirements of the job. Pundits were praising a quiet dignity that is but the other side of the comotose passivity that helped grease the skids since 2001, indicating that the excellence of Joe Torre in the public mind was less and less about the excellence of the team he piloted on the ballfield. Torre has in some sense, and temporarily to be sure, come to be bigger than the Yankees themselves, more important than the fortunes of the team, not least because he himself played a part in shrinking those fortunes over the last few years. And as I have blogged before, it is not just him, it is The Dynastics (Jeter, Rivera, Posada, Pettite, Clemens), though he of course fronts the group. As one by one this group whined about the possibility of Torre being fired, the media worried about whether they were being served, whether they would be happy with the outcome, whether they were being respected. It was as if the Yankees were no longer about the organization, their self-styled mission, the Bronx, New York City, or their nationwide fan base, it was about the psychic well-being of a small handful of mega-millionaires who were but a small part of the dynasty fashioned almost a decade ago. Is it any wonder that that same small group of players and the man who leads them should have lost, as the last 3 years clearly demonstrate, their competitive edge? Why do they so love Torre if not because he no longer pushes them out of their comfort zone? What is his repeated definition of the ALDS as a crapshoot about if not to allow his players to be comfortable with getting themselves bounced every year, usually by margins which evince that luck had nothing to do with it? I'm sure the late Johnny Oates used to tell his Rangers the same thing while the Yankees were beating their brains in every year. Once may be a crapshoot (98, 2005), twice may be a coincidence (99, 2006) but thrice begins to look like the law (2000, 2007).



Which brings us at last to the stench of hypocrisy. Because we like to assume the viability of meritocratic principles, the fetishism of personality--valuing people in distinction from rather than conformity with their accomplishments--necessarily breeds a virulent strain of hypocrisy. One never likes to see the object of glamorizing affection devalued, particularly since it incriminates one's own taste and judgment. So in the wake of the Detroit debacle last year, which unquestionably set this year's bar higher than the team wound up jumping, it was inevitable that people would take personally Joe's being held to the account they knew was coming. What you saw, as a result, was a series of defense strategies, as threadbare as they were predictable: asserting Joe wasn't responsible for the losses while conveniently forgetting the credit he got for the championships; emphasizing less tangibly baseball skills like managing the media and conveniently omitting to mention his massive tactical deficiencies (sports journalists ought to just say we like him, we really like him--it's the truth and it destroys their credibility as journalists, a twofer); insisting he got superstars to play team ball (actually they never played team defense; they couldn't hit situationally, which is the definition of team offense; I'll concede the bullpen operated as a team unit to blow games, but that's about it); he took the pressure off his players (yes, and as a result they became the posterboys for overpaid fat cat ballplayers).

Because the fetish of Torre draws upon the nostalgic fetish of the dynasty era, its toxic effects are likely to go on well past the now concluded tenure of torre himself. Already idiot columnists like Bob Klap-isch and Tom Ver-douche-i are insisting the Yankees must pay, and overpay, to ensure the services of Rivera and Posada, among the last of the Old Guard. But it is perhaps well to remember that when Torre was hired he had no previous connection to the Yankees. My point is not to do away with fetishism--sports fanaticism is in fact nothing else--rather to shift the fetish back where it belongs, onto the franchise or, as Seinfeld correctly puts it, onto the uniforms (there is no more proper fetish object than clothihg--ask Victoria's Secret). The front office must shift fan investment back to the pinstripes and to the players only insofar as they are wearing the pinstripes. When the last dynasty began, the players were thrilled to be Yankees. Now the Old Guard seems to believe the Yankees should be thrilled to have them, however they might perform when it counts.

It is for this reason that I have come to question my earlier recommendation that Girardi be made the new manager. Maybe we need to cut the ties to the dynasty altogether, as George did when he hired Torre. Maybe it should be La Russa or Valentine or somebody else, somebody who will manage the kids to measure their accomplishments in terms of the future of the greatest franchise in the world, rather than a past identified with a few increasingly obsolescent individuals.

I don't know if, as Michael comments, "the goal is attained and our work is done." The goal, as always, is to witness another championship. But certainly the avowed purpose of this blog is exhausted. I want to thank George and his boys for making Torre an offer that he couldn't accept, I want to thank slow joe himself for being crazy enough to turn it down. I want to thank you all for reading and responding. I've had just the best time doing this.

Farewell, farewell
To you who did,
You Lonely travellers all
The cold north wind
Will blow again
The winding road does call
Farewell, farewell