Was Joe Torre really manager of the Yankees as recently as last October? Even after months during which the sight of him in the blue and white of the Los Angeles Dodgers has become nearly normal, his return to New York, albeit in the National League, presents him less as a manager than as an unreal presence from a dimly remembered past. I don’t think it would be much more dissonant if John McGraw or Connie Mack turned up in Flushing to manage a set against the Mets.

Whatever his failings as a manager, and they were both several and serial, Torre was the only one in decades to transcend the sport. This wasn’t a matter of his merely being famous, but of his seeming to stand for a sort of clear serenity and basic decency that people today feel (as people in all times and all places have always felt) has gone missing in their increasingly crass culture. As a civic uncle or grandfather or neighborhood friend made good to a generation or two of baseball fans and New Yorkers, the man carried, and carries, a kind of respect generally unachievable in today’s game, engineered as it is to be an impersonal and efficient profit machine.

My grandmother, who wasn’t much of a baseball fan, adored Torre, considering him about as obviously meritorious a leader as someone such as Franklin Roosevelt. A friend of mine who literally doesn’t know the names of New York’s baseball teams loves Torre, or at least the idea of him as some throwback to a New York with broad avenues filled with streetcars, a city where men wore hats and a half-dozen newspapers ran daily editions. My wife, who would as soon as not see the Yankees fall into a bottomless well, has always thought that having Torre glare at you from the bench from under the brim of his cap must be the most unnerving thing in the entire world.

A manager who can make that sort of impression on people who don’t even care for or follow the game, who loomed over the capital of the world for a decade in something like the way mayors do, and who ran the only true dynasty of the free agency era, is not someone to whom other managers can be fairly compared. It’s hard enough to manage in New York; how do you follow on the sort of character who will probably have a stretch of highway named after him some day?

For those reasons, it really isn’t fair, on Torre’s return, to measure him up against his old catcher Joe Girardi, much less against his embattled capo Willie Randolph. Both men are really just baseball managers, whose moves, declarations, grimaces, and occasional embarrassing gaffes occupy some part of the city’s mental space, but who don’t really represent anything larger than themselves, or offer anything more than the promise of championships.

That Girardi might already display a better grasp of the relative importance of relief pitching than Torre ever did, or that Randolph has a knack for picking which improbable bench player is likely to be keyed in on the day’s pitcher that Torre never really had, or that neither shows anything like that maddening degree of stubborn loyalty to players of no real achievement that Torre did, is totally irrelevant. The man has already been completely subsumed in the legend, and the actual job of running boring baseball games against lousy teams in the middle of the summer has nothing at all to do with either one. Neither Girardi nor Randolph would ever be able to really compete, and it’s a good thing they don’t try.

So for three more days, the ghost will linger in Queens, indicting both the men who actually have to manage in his city just by his presence. Only one man could be the first in generations to bring dynastic baseball back to a city that fancies winning as its claimed right, just as only one man could get the credit for being at the top of baseball while his city underwent a great renaissance. If both achievements had at least as much to do with the time and place in which he found himself as with his skills and character, what of it? He was a great manager, he embodied what it meant to be a great leader, and most important, people saw and understood that these things were true. There will be no replacing Torre for a very long time; in blue and white, the man still isn’t gone.

tmarchman@nysun.com