Joe Torre Deserved Better

Yesterday the New York Yankees, my favorite team since I was old enough to know what baseball was, treated a decent, wonderful man with terrible disrespect. They offered a man who has taken them to the playoffs 12 years in a row, who has helped win them four World Series titles, and who has been the face of the team for every minute of those wonderful, magical 12 years. I think it stinks to high heaven.

Joe Torre is the class of baseball. Joe Torre deserved better than to be thrown a one year contract with a 33% decrease in pay. Do the Yankees think we're stupid? Does Steinbrenner, who Yankee fans, to a man, detest, think the public is so stupid as to think we won't see through this thin veil of treachery? Give us more credit than that, George. Offering a man like Joe Torre a one year contract, at a pay cut, is tantamount to offering Ghandi a bite of beef stew...you know he's going to turn you down.

But see, there's the genious, if you will, in what the Yankees did. They KNEW he would turn it down. Now they can turn around and say that he turned them down. Yea, whatever. Cashman, you're supposed to be a Torre man. You should be ashamed of yourself with this. You should all be ashamed. Joe Torre has more class in his little finger than all of you have put together.

This whole issue has shaken my faith in the Yankees to the core. It's no longer the game I loved when I was a kid. It's a business. It's purely and simply a business. That's the tragedy of the whole thing, too. Joe Torre, the best man for this Yankee job, got screwed because of the business. It's men like Joe Torre who made this game great in the first place.

Personally, I hope he takes a job somewhere else in the AL East and I hope he kicks the Yankees butt every single time they come to town. Baltimore, maybe. Toronto. Whatever it is, I hope he whips King George's team every single time.

And it won't take much, in my opinion, since a lot of the great Yankees will now depart the Bronx. Mo will leave. A-Rod will leave. Jorge will go. It wouldn't even surprise me if, at the end of his contract, Mr. Yankee, Derek Jeter left, too. Why should they stay? The best manager in baseball has been fired. And that's what it was, too, make no mistake. They fired him and insulted him in the same action.

Joe Torre deserved better.