There’s no need to be polite about it: The Yankees were humiliated this weekend, the manager should be fired, and the star player should be traded. A caveat, though, applies — the disposition of Joe Torre and Alex Rodriguez should really have nothing to do with the Yankees’ loss to the Tigers, and everything to do with the team’s fundamental political structure.

In strict baseball terms, no matter how ugly the losses were — and being shut out by Kenny Rogers in a playoff game is about as ugly as baseball gets — there’s no shame and no surprise in losing to Detroit. The fact that anyone is surprised by the result shows how little most people truly believe it when they claim that playoff baseball is all about pitching and defense. The Tigers had the best defense in the game this year and an excellent pitching staff. They led baseball in earned run average while playing in the sport’s toughest division. Maybe — just maybe — they won because they’re the better team.

The old school wisdom is that good pitching beats good hitting. State of the art research by Nate Silver and Dayn Perry, published in this year’s book “Baseball Between the Numbers,” shows that the strikeout rate of a team’s starters and the quality of its closer and defense correlate with playoff triumphs far better than anything else. Whichever angle you take, the Tigers, not the Yankees, were the team built for the playoffs, as you can see from the results. The Yanks won the game started by their best pitcher, lost a close one in the game started by their second-best pitcher, and were destroyed in the games in which they sent an elderly and infirm Randy Johnson and a wretched Jaret Wright to the hill. None of this is stunning.

So, how is this Joe Torre’s fault? The simple answer is that it’s not. He did make some awfully stupid moves.

Starting Gary Sheffield at first base was incomprehensible, starting Wright over Cory Lidle was pretty ridiculous; his lineup moves from batting Bob Abreu third against a lefty to batting Rodriguez eighth were goofy as hell, and his puzzling rotations of Melky Cabrera, Bernie Williams, and Jason Giambi in and out of the lineup may as well have been based on astrology. None of that would have much mattered had the team had better starters.

Still, he has to go. He’s been with the Yankees for 11 years, and that’s a long time to manage in New York. He’s not a failure, and any movement to paint him as one in the next few days will be stupid — the team may not have won a World Series since Bill Clinton was president, but it’s won two pennants, developed some great young talent, and been consistently excellent over the last six years, often in quite trying circumstances. (The rest of the country and Mets Nation weep salty tears for those trying circumstances, of course, but losing your starting outfield is never fun.) If he’s a failure, so are Bobby Cox and Tony LaRussa.

Not being a failure doesn’t make him a success, though, and it’s his handling of Rodriguez that really marks the difference between why he should stay and why he should go. Torre has never been much of a strategist or tactician — his main strength has always been his ability to manage the egos of players and put them in position to succeed. He not only hasn’t done that with Rodriguez, he’s brutally humiliated him, first by participating in the shameful and repulsive team hit job on the embattled third baseman that ran in Sports Illustrated last month, and then by batting him eighth in a playoff elimination game.No matter how badly Rodriguez was hitting, he wasn’t hitting any worse than anyone else on the team. Singling him out that way made him the story, rather than the collective failure. It was a crass move, and it didn’t work.

People may hate Rodriguez, may think he’s a failure and a phony and a fraud, but he remains a transcendent talent and the best player on the team. This is a player who’s one day going to hold the career records for home runs and runs, and Torre has gone out of his way to expose him to shame and embarrassment. Like his baffling decisions and the failure of the Yankees to win a World Series, it’s not on its own the sort of thing that should lead to his dismissal. Add it all together and factor in how long a tenure 11 years is in today’s game, though, and it’s time for Torre to collect his complementary watch and be out.

This leads naturally to two questions: “Who should replace him?” and “What’s to be done with Rodriguez?”

The latter question is easy to answer: Just trade him. The Yankees aren’t going to get a great collection of talent for a player who costs $16 million and is regarded, rightly or not, as a big bundle of frayed nerves who may have been irreparably damaged by New York City, but they need to just show him some respect and part ways with him. He deserves better than to be treated like another broken toy to be petulantly tossed on the pile with the rest of the broken toys, or to be expected to play with a bunch of pious frauds who preach teamwork and winning play while shanking one another in public. Ship him to the Cubs for a box of rocks and do away with the embarrassing distraction.

Another option would be for someone with some credibility to forcefully say that whatever struggles he’s undergone here, Rodriguez is one of the greatest players of all time and not to be blamed for the failures of an entire team and organization. I wouldn’t count on that happening.

I don’t know what the answer to the first question is, but it’s not Lou Piniella. This irrelevant blowhard couldn’t win when he had Rodriguez, Johnson, Ken Griffey and Edgar Martinez in their primes and a farm system coughing up the likes of Jason Varitek, Derek Lowe, and Mike Hampton. He couldn’t win in the playoffs with a team that won 116 regular season games. He not only couldn’t do anything in Tampa Bay with a collection of young talent generally regarded as the best in baseball, but he spent his entire time there groaning about the unfairness of having to play a lot of prospects, as if he’d gone there under the impression he’d be managing a $120 million team. He’s a total fraud. Billy Martin or Joe McCarthy would be better options.

Whoever replaces Torre, it should be someone young and someone with an idea or two in his head. The Yankees are in the process of managing a transition: Mariano Rivera and Jorge Posada and even Derek Jeter are not going to be Yankees forever.Whatever the team decides to do, the last thing it needs to do is bring in some fossil with grand designs of riding a dead horse to World Series victory. Bring in someone who understands that Chien-Ming Wang, Robinson Cano, and Phillip Hughes are right now the three most important players on the team, not someone who thinks that by yelling at people he can revive the ghosts of 1996. That time is over; it has been for years.