And Let Us Never Speak of This Again

Let me see if I understand this correctly. Joe Torre was “insulted” by the Yankees offer of a one-year contract for $5 million to manage the club. With incentives, the deal could have been worth an additional $1 million for each round of playoffs that the team reached. So $6, $7 or $8 million per year were all potential final compensation packages for next year. And Joe Torre found that insulting.

When the subject involved is a player – let’s say A-Rod – the common reaction to a story like this is backlash. “How could A-Rod turn down $x million to play a kid’s game??? He thinks that’s an insult?! I think it’s an insult that my son’s algebra teacher has to drive a used Civic with no A/C while poor Alex has to decide between 26 or 28 inch rims on his Navigator!” But those arguments are childish since they ignore the fact that we live in a market economy. When Tom Hicks thinks that Alex is worth $252 million, by default, he is. Yet compared to the market, even with his insulting 33% base pay cut, Torre is still light years ahead. Lou Piniella is the next-best paid manager in the league and he makes an average of $3.3 million per year on his three year deal with the Cubs. So despite an offer that would pay nearly 50% more than the next-richest manager in the league, Joe was insulted.

Furthermore, Torre and the fawning reporters are conveniently forgetting that he actually deserves a pay cut. When Torre signed his final contract extension in April 2004, his team was coming off of their second AL pennant in three seasons. And for four of the five seasons prior to that run, the team had won the World Series. Torre had earned that pay raise. In the four seasons since, his team has endured the worst collapse in postseason history, followed by three consecutive first round exits. In their last seventeen postseason games, Torre’s Yankees are 4-13. Taking nothing away from his managerial achievements, Torre has earned this pay cut.

That is, of course, if you seriously consider a baseball manager to be an integral part of a club’s success. I don’t. How else can we explain Clint Hurdle, who entered this season 84 games under .500 and will exit with an NL or World Series pennant? Or how about Terry Francona, who was run out of Philadelphia with a .440 winning percentage only to become a demigod in Boston? And Willie Randolph, whose job security alert level went from green to yellow to red in the space of twenty days? The truth is that a baseball manager, quite unlike a football or basketball head coach, is essentially a cop on a horse, riding around doing his best to look important but really not doing a damned thing.

Here’s where it gets confusing. According to Torre, money wasn’t the deciding factor in his decision. Hold on a second: On one hand the offer was an insult but on the other hand the decision wasn’t about money? That’s awful mealy-mouthed. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt here and assume that he really wasn’t interested in managing the Yankees anymore. Let’s say that he wasn’t interested in the constant scrutiny coming at him from all angles: The shameless New York tabloid press, the knee-jerk fans on sports radio call-in shows and, worst of all, the deluded old bat who ostensibly runs the team. Let’s conclude that he just didn’t want to manage the team anymore.

Given those circumstances, what should he have done? Resigned. Not even considered the team’s offer. Told the world that he wanted to go out on his own terms and longed for a new challenge. The press would have eaten that nonsense up. But he didn’t do that. He waited for an offer and he turned it down. It was about the money and he didn’t get enough. If only he could have said that.