We come not to bury Caesar, but to praise him. Still, every hero can use a little dirt tossed on his shoes, so let’s be realistic about Joe Torre. Yankees insiders like Mel Stottlemyre and Yogi Berra have praised the manager for leading a damaged pitching staff into the playoffs. Torre is credited with successfully “slotting” project pitchers like Aaron Small and Shawn Chacon into the rotation. “Slotting” is used here as an analog for “improvisatory brilliance.” But you can’t credit a manager with making great choices when his menu has only one item on it.

When it came to his pitchers, Torre never had any options. “Hmm,” he must have thought as he made out each lineup card. “Pavano is hurt. Wright is hurt. Wang is hurt. Brown is hurt (thank goodness). Either I give Small the start or I can pitch the game myself.” This is not the same level of decision as Casey Stengel trying to decide which of his 10 starting pitchers has the best chance to defeat the Indians on a September Sunday.

The truth about most managers is that they don’t like to improvise – wisely so, because there’s no easier way to be wrong than to make heat-ofthe-moment decisions. Joe Torre had a difficult season in which his calls frequently left him with egg (or a whole Proctor omelet) on his face. Because the non-Gordon/Rivera portion of the bullpen was moribund, Torre had cause to regret many of his pitching changes. In many cases, Torre would have had better results not choosing at all – eschewing the entire left-handed relief crew, for example. It sounds radical, but Angels manager Mike Scioscia was able to make that mental leap – my good right-handers are better than my bad left-handers, even against left-handed batters – and has found excellent results.

The flipside of Torre’s greatest asset, his placidity, is passiveness. The forking Yankees’ hierarchy has long held that Torre’s job is to work with the players supplied to him by the organization; his input into roster matters is seemingly limited to who the reserve catcher will be (a choice he consistently mishandles).

In short, the brain trust down in Tampa requires the manager to make chicken salad out of chicken Womack. Torre seems all too eager to cooperate, even when the organizational decisions have been guaranteed to handcuff the team. He’ll play all the veteran retreads that the organization hands him. If Torre had a problem with having to start Bubba Crosby and Ruben Sierra in the outfield for part of September, he didn’t say so.

In part, this reflects his belief that it is better to fail with old mediocrities than unproven players, in part because he’s not an assertive decision maker when it comes to benching a player – his temperament requires him to give a player a lot of rope before giving up on him.

This approach served him well with Comeback (from Self-Inflicted Wounds) Player of the Year Jason Giambi, but has also damaged the Yankees in nearly every season he’s managed, not to mention all of his other major league stops.

Still, this very quality is what makes his return to the Yankees such good news for the team. In an organization cursed by upper-level whimsy, Torre’s stolidity is a necessary bulwark against chaos. Since the “Gray Flannel Suit” days of the 1950s, “Company Man” has always been more of an epithet than a compliment. In Torre’s case, it’s a high honor, because he’s the first Yankee manager in 40 years to understand that he has a higher duty to the organization than fighting turf wars with the owner – wars that the owner, by virtue of his position, would inevitably win.

Most important, Torre predicated his return to the club on a more streamlined decision-making process among the scattered, fractured, Yankees leadership. In the final analysis, it matters less who makes the decisions on the field than that the organization possesses a voice of reason, someone who can bring together a leadership that spent 2005 more focused on scoring runs than improving the team. Torre and the players were clearly betrayed by the leadership’s lack of focus and its inability to make affirmative decisions on bullpen replacements, center fielders, and trade acquisitions. The team drifted and ultimately lost in the playoffs to a team that wasn’t necessarily better, but had more of its ducks lined up in a row.

It is going to be a difficult winter for the Yankees. The free-agent market offers few sure solutions to the problems that have dogged the team the last few years, and the organization cannot trade too many pitching prospects without risking another generation of Pavanos and Browns in the near future.

More than ever, the Yankees require level-headed leadership. It would be near impossible for a new manager to learn the Byzantine hierarchy in time to make any kind of positive impact. Torre, because of his gravitas, track record, and history with the organization, is the only manager with the moral authority to command the attention of Steinbrenner, Swindal, Levine, Trost, Connors, et al. He is far from perfect, but for the Yankees, he is indispensable, the only possible super-ego for a team with an overabundance of id.

Mr. Goldman is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel, released this year.