On Sunday, Joe Torre earned his 1,000th victory as manager of the Yankees, joining Miller Huggins, Joe McCarthy, and Casey Stengel as the only pinstriped coaches to achieve that combination of longevity and consistent success. The franchise’s managerial leader board now looks like this:

In constructing a parallel biography for this golden quartet, it quickly becomes apparent that Torre lacks something which all three of his predecessors possessed: a nickname. In the first half of the 20th century, the newspaper sports pages hadn’t become as straight-laced as the news and business sections. Not only did writers frequently break out in poetry when describing the latest Babe Ruth home run, but they often referred to familiar characters by an affectionate shorthand.

Huggins, all of 5-foot-6, was “the Mighty Mite.” The intense McCarthy was the now embarrassingly un-PC “Marse Joe.” And Stengel was “The Ol’ Perfesser,” which was uniquely versatile in that it had the virtue of being true (Stengel briefly was an actual professor, made part of a college faculty while coaching its baseball team) and could serve as both compliment and insult, depending on what one thought of Stengel as a leader and a teacher.

The closest Torre ever got to a nickname was “Clueless Joe,” the now infamous tabloid headline that greeted Torre’s hiring in 1996. This makes it doubly ironic that the somewhat dour Torre now finds himself in the effervescent Stengel’s company, because this reaction was not dissimilar to that which met Stengel’s hiring nearly half a century earlier. In fact, the roads each man took to New York are strongly reminiscent of each other.

Prior to coming to the Yankees, Stengel managed for nine years in the National League and had never finished in the first division. That those years were spent with the Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Braves, two teams that were literally bankrupt, did not earn him any slack from his critics. When Torre was hired for the 1996 season, he seemed a 55-year-old three-time loser, the latest in an endless string of George Steinbrenner’s managerial gaffes, another retread patsy to be chewed up and spit out.

Torre had managed for 14 seasons in the National League. Like Stengel, he coached a team in dire financial straits (the Mets, from 1977-81). He won a divisional title with the Braves in 1982, but wasn’t able to make much headway with the Cardinals, a team he inherited at an awkward moment; the team needed to rebuild at a time when its ownership was least interested in investing in its future. Torre’s team in St. Louis appeared listless and his reputation suffered.

Both Stengel and Torre were rescued from managerial oblivion by long-term associates who had recently become general manger of the Yankees: George Weiss in Stengel’s case, and Bob Watson in Torre’s. Each manager found that his approach to the game fit perfectly with the organization at that moment in time – Torre became an island of calm in a chaotic atmosphere, while Stengel was almost the opposite, a note of orchestrated chaos on a team that had become overly conservative.

For Stengel, the equivalent of the “Clueless Joe” headline was the column by Dave Egan, his longtime critic from the Boston Daily Record.

“Well sirs and ladies,” Egan wrote when Stengel was hired in October, 1948, “the Yankees now have been mathematically eliminated from the 1949 pennant race. They eliminated themselves when they engaged Perfessor Casey Stengel to mismanage them for the next two years, and you may be sure that the Perfessor will oblige to the best of his unique ability … [the New York writers] will love Stengel. If it’s stories and mimicry and home-spun humor they want, they’ll get it from Stengel by day and by night, each day and each night. They’ll get everything from him, indeed, with the exception of the pennants to which they have become accustomed.”

Egan would prove to be as wrong as “Clueless Joe” turned out to be. In both cases, the critics failed to see how a manager whose skills had been a poor fit for one team might be a perfect fit with another. When Stengel resigned as manager of the Braves in 1943, Egan wrote, “He’s a great guy except to those who work for him. He’s a funny guy, too, but he’s always funny at somebody else’s expense, and the somebody else is usually within hearing distance … I laugh a sour laugh each time I read in the papers that Stengel is a great man on developing young ballplayers … yet he always remained funny, in his cruel and malicious way.”

What Egan either did not realize or would not concede was that Stengel wasn’t really given any young players to develop in Boston. The Braves had no farm system and World War II pushed the manpower needle far past empty. With the Yankees, Stengel was able to establish dozens of young players (including a 24-year-old Yogi Berra and, in 1951, a 19-year-old Mickey Mantle), and his biting criticism helped to rein in a club that had grown lax under soft managers.

Torre’s serene and cautious nature worked against him in fluid situations with the Mets, Braves, and Cardinals. His record with young players was not good; he picked his favorites and stayed with them, despite results. Unlike Stengel, Torre does not want to manage chaos, he wants to eliminate it. That meant preferring Tony Fernandez to Derek Jeter in 1996, or keeping Jorge Posada behind Joe Girardi for years, both cases of preferring the known to the unknown.

The Yankees, with their roster of veteran mercenaries, have mostly protected Torre from these decisions. Instead, they’ve asked him to blend disparate, high-priced egos into a cohesive whole. In an era when the circus that is being a young, rich athlete has often clashed with the Yankees’ tradition of quiet dignity and short haircuts, Torre’s desire for order – which emphasizes professionalism – has made him the perfect man for the job.

With Torre and Stengel, it was easier for the critics to write something funny than to grapple with the complex facts of both men. Stengel eventually got his due, while Torre now has had 1,000 wins’ worth of reassessment.

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