Coveting Mets job is unseemly for Torre
NEW YORK – Once again another pennant race lives in the South Bronx. October looms and the Yankees are slamming their way through a line of Tampa Bay pitchers. Joe Torre must miss it so.
New York is all but in the playoffs and Torre is stuck across the country with baseball’s most dysfunctional organization and a team of players who long stopped listening. He is out of the postseason for the first time in 15 years. Irrelevance does not suit the departing manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Not when the memories still burn fresh of autumn nights bundled in his Yankees jacket, listening to the fans chant his name. Trapped in the sun, with the Dodgers collapsing all around, he got on a plane and flew here to unofficially announce his availability as a manager in New York.
He can never get the Yankees again, but his trip to the new Yankee Stadium to honor George Steinbrenner had nothing to do with reconciliation. His disdain for the way the Steinbrenner family drove him out with a one-year contract offer loaded with incentives after the 2007 season was barely disguised in the book he co-wrote two years later. He long made sure to stay far away from Yankee Stadiums new and old following his departure despite making his winter home a short drive to the north.
After jetting across the country, Torre walked solemnly to the giant new Steinbrenner plaque Monday and dropped his resume along the way.
His eyes are set firmly on the New York Mets, the franchise he first managed in the late 1970s while still a part-time player. The Mets have been a disaster, saddled with underachieving and overpaid stars. They have been managed incapably by Jerry Manuel, who is all but certain to be replaced at season’s end. Faced with fading luster in a city that is owned by the Yankees, he is exactly the face of the franchise the Mets crave. An easy grab of a few back page headlines.
It would be a perfect fit. And he has done his best to keep his name alive in the days since announcing he is leaving Los Angeles at the end of next of next week, alternately saying he won’t close the door on managing and then expressing disgust at speculation linking him to the Mets job. Last week, he called such talk “irresponsible.”
Then he came here on Monday, went on WFAN radio and said he was “curious” about what teams might be interested in him and then talked passionately about his previous time with the Mets three decades before.
News of this reached Manuel on Tuesday evening in Florida, where the Mets were playing. Not surprisingly Manuel did not take Torre’s comments well. The manager who never seems angry about anything was furious.
“I find it also curious when someone comments about a job someone already has,” Manuel told the Associated Press. “I don’t know him on a personal basis but when things like that come out you question the integrity.”
Later, trapped by his comments and Manuel’s ire, Torre apologized and said he was “closing the door on managing the Mets.” But his words or remorse came too late, after whipping into town and churning a cyclone of controversy.
Torre has become perplexing. He came to the Yankees in 1996 with a reputation of having a prickly demeanor and being consumed with himself, then did so much publicly to be the opposite. He was a soothing voice of reason around the insanity of Steinbrenner, and always gracious, even in his departure. No one saw a different side until he went after the Dodgers manager’s job already occupied by Grady Little. Then came the book in 2009. He called star third baseman Alex Rodriguez "A-Fraud" and alleged that he felt “betrayed” by good friend Brian Cashman, the team’s general manager, for not fighting harder to keep him after 2007.
For his last three years in Los Angeles, Torre has always seemed more like a manager in transition between New York jobs than dedicated to the Dodgers. He rode Manny Ramirez(notes) to two National League Championship Series, and once Manny broke down, ownership imploded and young Dodger stars like Matt Kemp(notes) stopped paying attention to him, Torre jumped off the careening Dodgers train and raced across the country to wrap Cashman in an embrace.
The irony in this is that managing the Mets is a job Torre should not want. The team is beset with bad contracts and mediocre players. It doesn’t have the same instability Frank and Jamie McCourt brought to the Dodgers, but it has had its share of chaos.
Still, New York is New York and Torre is New York. There’s a good chance the Mets would have called anyway – as a courtesy if nothing else. Now perhaps the phone can’t ring, and even if it does he will have to think hard before giving an answer.
