If Baker Is a Hot Commodity, Torre Deserves a Job
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The following isn’t an argument for retaining Joe Torre as manager of the Yankees, but a study in contrasts. Yesterday afternoon, the Cincinnati Reds officially named Dusty Baker as the team’s new manager. Simultaneously, Joe Torre spent another day in limbo, neither employed nor unemployed, waiting for the Yankees to gather their New York and Tampa branches for talks on peace and reconciliation.
It is doubtful that Baker’s hiring will have any effect on the resolution to the Torre saga, but it should, if only in underscoring Torre’s many benign qualities. If Baker can be forgiven for his managerial sins and brought back into the fold, then Torre shouldn’t even be on the hot seat. All managers have flaws, but Baker’s are huge, persistent, and, on a team level, self-destructive. Compared to Baker’s foibles, Torre’s problems with bullpen management and endless patience with his veterans hardly register as problems.
Torre has fried a reliever or two in recent years, relying too heavily on pitchers like Paul Quantrill and Tom Gordon in the regular season, rendering them burnt out husks just in time for the playoffs. This is largely a reflection of the general manager’s failure to supply the Yankees with a deep enough bullpen in recent seasons; given the unforgiving nature of Yankees ownership, Torre would have been crazy to buck his instincts and play the cold hand instead of the hot one. That’s a team-level decision that he’s not free to make. Unlike other managers, the man who leads the Yankees can’t burn a game while he tries to get a handle on the future. This is, after all, a franchise that has on occasion convoked an auto-da-fe over lost spring training games.
Torre inevitably did blow games trying to administer sudden immersion therapy to Kyle Farnsworth and pals. If we could pin Torre down for an honest game-by-game review of the season, there is little doubt that there would be some cases where Torre handled the bullpen in such a way that resulted in losses, but many others, almost certainly more, where he felt forced to use some of his worst bullpen hands because he was fumbling for alternatives, because one setup man can’t pitch 162 games.
These problems aside, Torre’s in-season management has reflected an awareness of what kind of team he has and the power-hitting era in which he lives. Though Torre has sometimes liked to present himself as a National League-style manager, he has not made a fetish of one-run strategies. He bunts, but usually not to excess. The Yankees run the bases, but at a good success rate. A manager who fancies himself a master tactician and then puts his team to tasks they can’t, or even shouldn’t, accomplish is far more destructive — consider the maniacally one-run oriented Ozzie Guillen of the White Sox, whose base-runners were caught five times more often than the Yankees while stealing 45 fewer bases. Torre has his failings, but he knows how to stay out of his own way.
It’s not clear that Baker possesses the same knowledge. Baker won three Manager of the Year awards while in San Francisco, guiding his team to four postseason appearances. Yet it’s not really apparent that he understood what was happening around him. Between 1993 and 2002, the Giants rarely had pitching staffs that could claim to be more than average. In the seasons in which they contended anyway — most of his stay — it was because their offense, led by Barry Bonds, succeeded in getting on base and scoring enough runs to remain competitive. Take Baker’s 1999 Giants, a team that missed the playoffs. The pitching staff was miserable. The offense featured Bonds, J.T. Snow, Jeff Kent, Bill Mueller, and Ellis Burks, all of whom excelled at getting on base and hitting for power. The team wasn’t fast and it was just average when it came to batting average, but due to its power and patience it finished third in the league in runs scored. In an off year, the Giants won 86 games.
Yet in Chicago, Baker derided hitters who walked frequently as base-cloggers and purged the team of patience to such a severe extent that the team ranked last in the NL in walks drawn in both 2005 and 2006. In the latter season, the Cubs became just the 10th team since 1968 to draw fewer than 400 walks in a full season.
Baker’s brutal overuse of Mark Prior down the 2003 stretch has also become an object lesson for all of baseball. The “Joba Rules” would not have come into being without Baker’s example. Torre’s Yankees have blown some playoff series in recent years, but he’s never stood athwart his own success the way Baker has. Perhaps Torre’s killed the odd reliever, but relief pitchers are such a variable bunch that it’s impossible to tell where his handling ends and random variation starts.
Baker is a valuable commodity while Torre sits in the Star Chamber. The irony is almost painful. No, this isn’t an argument for keeping Torre, but it is a suggestion that ownership should remember what passes for good management these days before reaching their verdict.
Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for yesnetwork.com.