A frustrated reader suggested that today’s column should be devoted to a thorough recitation of “the worst on-field blunders in the history of the Yankees.” The reader was moved to make the request after watching a stunned Scott Proctor hold on to the ball after catching Carlos Gomez’s pop-up bunt on Tuesday night, and in so doing, failing to make an easy, potentially game-saving double play.

Proctor’s snooze doesn’t rise to the level of historic — it happened during an anonymous June game, not the World Series, after all — and there are so many other great blunders from which to choose: Babe Ruth caught stealing to end the 1926 World Series; Bobby Meacham and Dale Berra both out at the plate on the same throw in 1985; the eighth-inning errors by Mike Blowers, Jim Leyritz, and Jesse Barfield that caused Andy Hawkins to pitch a no-hit game and still lose in 1990; Chuck Knoblauch holding the ball while countless Indians jogged around the bases in the 1998 AL Championship Series, and any time Bernie Williams ran the bases.

Unfortunately, Yankees manager Joe Torre is the one who made the real blunder on Tuesday by choosing to play Proctor in the game in the first place. It is probably unrealistic to expect a nearly 67-year-old manager to learn new tricks, but almost four years after Torre pointed Jeff Weaver at his head and pulled the trigger, Torre still can’t persuade himself to let his closer pitch in a tie game on the road. He’d rather gamble that lesser pitchers will extend the game long enough for the Yankees to get a lead, giving Mariano Rivera a chance to save the game. It’s so obvious that this puts the cart far before the horse that it doesn’t seem to need pointing out; if the home team scores off whatever 2007 version of Weaver that Torre is using in the bottom of the ninth, the lead that Torre sought to protect will never have a chance to manifest. Perhaps it exists in one of the parallel universes that are the province of science fiction and string theory, but not in ours.

The Torre we’re seeing this year increasingly looks like a refugee from a parallel universe, one in which the mediocre manager of the Mets, Braves, and Cardinals never gave way to the Hall of Famer of 1996–2001. In this difficult season, it seems as if this admiral (we can’t call him “the captain”) has decided to go down with the ship rather than manning the pumps. He’s playing the hand he’s dealt rather than making even the slightest attempt to innovate. After Tuesday night’s game, Torre said he was protecting Rivera after the 1.2 innings he threw last Friday. He also may know more about the state of Rivera’s arm than he’s letting on. That possibility aside, Torre may have protected Rivera and the Yankees right out of the postseason. Through Tuesday, Rivera has pitched just 27.2 innings, a light workload compared to most of the game’s other closers — with the exception of fellow hothouse flower Jon Papelbon. That lean work schedule has been not only the result of Torre’s safeguarding Rivera’s arm, but also Torre’s slavish devotion to the saves rule. Torre would rather pitch a Ron Villone type with a four-run lead because the rule says that it is not a save situation, even if (a) Rivera has been sitting for four or more days (b) using a Villone type may turn the game into a save situation anyway, and (c) the Yankees aren’t in a position in which they can take anything for granted, including maintaining a four-run lead.

A manager should be able to distinguish between a rulebook save situation and a life save situation. Because Torre cannot, Rivera has just nine saves this season. When the Yankees win, they outscore their opponents by an average of almost five runs, so the situation doesn’t exist. By contrast, when they lose, they’ve been outscored by less than three runs, one of the lowest margins of defeat in the majors. It has not occurred to Torre that the Yankees might have won some of those games if he had used his best pitchers in the clinches. The team’s 4–13 record in one-run games attests to the failure of his imagination. If the Yankees had even been able to break even in those contests, they would now be contenders instead of pretenders.

At the risk of beating the world’s deadest horse, Torre has suffered a similar decline in the ability to discern a forest from trees. He demonstrated that in this year’s Mientkiewicz-Cairo continuity at first base, a position where the Yankees have sacrificed home runs (four bases) in exchange for the comfort of knowing that their first baseman can make a stylish scoop (one base). From George Washington to Ronald Reagan, all great leaders decline as they age. This is no insult to Torre, but simply a fact of life. He has carved his place in history, and now he should be history. He knew what to do in 1996, but in an ironical twist, is now clueless in 2007. It’s time for a change.

Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for yesnetwork.com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.