In the chapter titled “The Issues Of Alex“, Torre says:
“When it comes to a key situation, he can’t get himself to concern himself with getting the job done, instead of how it looks.
“There’s a certain free fall you have to go through when you commit yourself without a guarantee that it’s always going to be good. There’s sort of a trust, a trust and commitment thing that has to allow yourself to fail. Allow yourself to be embarrassed. Allow yourself to be vulnerable. And sometimes players aren’t willing to do that. They have a reputation to uphold. They have to have an answer for it. It’s an ego thing.”
[...]
“For me success was still going to be about pitching. But seeing his personality concerned me because you could see his focus was on individual stuff.”
Now, I think Torre’s statements, back then, were 100% spot on. In 2009, we saw a vastly different ARod and that resulted in a player on a mission to help his team win. He was hurt, having to also admit to PED usage and missed the first part of the season. His return was and subsequent performance over the balance of the season proved to many, even long-time critics and skeptics like me, that this guy finally “got it”. I’ve been very critical of ARod, ever since I started writing this blog. In fact, I created and named it shortly after ARod opted out of his $252 million deal, because he was, to me, only about the money and the image. Last year changed my views a bit, though no one would ever mistake me for a big fan of ARod, the person.
ARod’s statements above spoke loud and clear about how he feels towards Torre, and rightfully so. Reading Torre’s book was fascinating but to me, some of this stuff represented a breach of trust earned and expected by players, management and coaches alike.
After the 2009 title and two and a half years after Torre’s very successful reign ended, how do you feel about Torre? About the book? About his treatment of and transparency into ARod?
To me, this says it all:
Maybe I' m biased, but I'm with A-Rod here. It always seemed to me that the guy wasn't 100% "right", psychologically. He's socially awkward, has done some weird things in situations both on and off the field, and so on. But can you really blame a guy for being socially awkward, putting too much pressure on himself? He never learned anything differently. And sure, it's easy to say "I would never react that way in such and such situation", but frankly, none of us has ever been in A-Rod's situation. None of us have ever been considered the sure-fire talent of a lifetime, ever since being a teenager. None of us have been offered a 252 million$ deal (though I'm totally open to one), and all conjecture about how we would respond in such a situation is just that.
Why should this psychological stuff be "easier" to deal with anyway? There are brilliant writers that couldn't get on top of a table if their life depended on it, there are amazingly nice guys in baseball that can't hit a lick. A-Rod can, and he can't do some of those other things, that perhaps come naturally to you and me (ok, well, you).
In a sense, Derek Jeter has been lucky: he' s been drafted by the franchise he' s always loved, played well enough to be accepted from the start, and has shown enough class to gather respect from everyone around the league. His exploits in the first few post seasons are legendary. Part of that is Derek's own merit, and part of it is luck. As soon as A-Rod left Seattle, of course was he going to get big bucks. A-Rod was on the team right when the whole team collapsed against Boston. Was that his fault, his fault alone? No. But it made for a nice little storyline. And he' s been viewed through that spectrum since.
I think it's ironic that Torre accuses A-Rod of not putting the team in first place. If A-Rod does well, he helps this team. Period. You know what ISN'T putting the team first? Hitting your (psychologically vulnerable) best hitter eighth, esp. without discussing it with him.
Do I believe A-Rod could have handled things better? Yes. But I know few people for which that statement isn't true. I don't think those mistakes should haunt him forever. Good for him that he reacted the way he did in 2009. I root for the Yankees, and that means rooting for A-Rod. Even with his faults.
torre is far less important to the team than a-rod. he didn't do his job if he didn't manage to make a-rod comfortable on the team as a player. old baseball retarded nonsense aside, it's a billion dollar business run by a guy who holds grudges against actually productive people on the team. a shame this torre guy wasn't gotten rid of sooner.
"I root for the Yankees, and that means rooting for A-Rod. Even with his faults."
Me too.
Awayish: "he didn’t do his job if he didn’t manage to make a-rod comfortable on the team as a player"
Well, I kinda/sorta agree. I think Torre DID go out of his way to try to ingratiate ARod into the Yanks clubhouse, but ARod's style, at least back then, was to be the lone wolf. In the book, it's Giambi that approached Torre and told him that Torre has to stop "coddling" ARod.
It's a fascinating discussion and debate.
Torre received too much credit, but he WAS the right manager for that team. Would they have won 4 titles with someone else at the helm? We'll never know, but we DO know that we don't win those 4 titles (plus last year's) without #42 at the end of the games.
I think Wouter is correct for the most part. I also think Joe Torre ruined managing in general because every other team thought they could hire placid guys who never argue with umpires and win - not understanding that everyone else didn't have 4 times the payroll of the average team.
Also, the portion about Jeter versus Arod in postseason is spot on. If you look at both their overall postseason numbers, Arod is slightly over his career regular season OPS in the postseason and so is Jeter. All Yankee fans think of Jeter as Mr. Postseason but a .863 OPS versus a .844 regular season OPS hardly makes him Billy Hatcher in terms of differential. Arod's postseason OPS of .977 versus regular season of .961 is basically the same differential and Jeter never carried a team on his back to the title the way ARod did last year. But to hear Yankee fans tell it, Arod is a huge choker and Jeter is God. Too bad Arod didn't have David Cone and David Wells in the late 90's.
With Alex, it may be about the money. It may be about a LOT of money. But there's one thing that I think distinguishes him from the game's pure mercenaries: he also genuinely likes to win. From the moment the Yankees signed him during the 2003-04 offseason, I have been a lonely pro-Alex voice among my fellow Yankees fans, on the philosophy that you have to be pleased when your team has the greatest player of his generation (okay, there's a strong case for Pujols in that race, but he's the only competition, and Alex is clearly the best position player in the American League over the course of his career).
I can't defend everything. The swat play on Arroyo. The "ha!" shout in Toronto. The steroids, which, thankfully, it seems he took only during his Texas years, and without which he would have still been his league's best player anyway. But what I will say is that I think Scott Boras and Tom Hicks truly screwed up this man's psyche, and that it's taken him years to start to sort himself out. When Alex came up with Seattle, he struck me as almost Griffey-like, a kid who experienced the exercise of his own talents with a sort of wondering joy.
The money turned Alex inward. He drank the Boras Kool-Aid and allowed himself to be convinced that the only righteous course was to deal with those who would give him the most. He had the talent for fame but not the maturity for it, precisely because he was too much of a wide-eyed kid. A $252 million contract is still huge today, but we have gotten so used to the money that we may have stopped appreciating how absurd an effect it must have had on the mind of a man-child ballplayer who was offered it in 2000. (My younger brother, a Mets fan and Yankee-hater, has his own theory: that A-Rod has Asperger's or something similar, and he just doesn't process the social miscues in his own actions).
But notice something else. Go back through interviews with Alex during his Texas years, and you'll find any number of quotes that betray discomfort over being a highly paid gear on a losing team. When the Yankees reacquired Jeff Nelson from Seattle at the trade deadline in 2003, Alex positively gushed with both respect and frustration saying, "That gives them the championship." This, over a middle reliever, albeit a very good one. He always wanted to win, and when you peeled away the layers, there was regret at choosing the money over the wins. A cynic would say he was feigning, but I say he just did something that anyone with a regret does — embrace the decision he made all the more forcefully to convince himself it was the right one. And that pushed the dominoes of ego. He was A-Rod, the $252 million man (or centaur), and if he couldn't win, at least he was A-Rod, the $252 million man (or centaur).
And as your photo illustrates — and as anyone who's seen Alex in a winning moment must admit — the kid in him still comes through when he's in a pure baseball moment. At one early April game I attended a couple of seasons ago, he hit a game-winning grand slam against Baltimore, and his body language, from swinging the bat, to running the bases, to throwing his helmet with the most exuberance I've seen a player show in that act, to jumping on the plate, just screamed, "Am I home at last?"
And now that he's both admitted his biggest past transgression and won a title? Maybe he really will feel at home in his own skin.
Those are some great points Jason. Torre probably WAS the right manager (or type of manager) for that team. Coming along at the same time as 4 Yankee legends was of course a big part of the success, and his interaction with those 4 has been outstanding, while commanding the respect of the other pieces of the team. But A-Rod, well.. that's a different person altogether. It's hard to say anyone made any fundamental mistakes. It's the interaction that was created between them. A superstar player with a special kind of demeanor trying to fit in a team with a superstar "in-group". I like to think that if the Yankees hadn't blown the '04 series, a lot of this drama would've remained in the realm of fiction. But so it goes. A ball gets stuck in Trot Nixon's glove, and all of a sudden, a player who couldn't handle that is labeled a choker. Correlation is still causation in the minds of plenty of sports writers. And it snowballed from there. Alex didn't have the social skills to right the ship, and I think Torre might have gotten frustrated with a player that didn't respond to his paternal style the way he was used to. Assigning the blame to one party while absolving the other is ludicrous in my opinion.
Also, yes: Hail Mo. (for your home assignment, please imagine the following alternate universe: A-Rod with Mo's personality and Mo with A-Rod's personality. If the thought didn't make you nauseated, that is.)
I'll write out a longer comment on Alex, Torre, memes, and so on in a bit, but for now I'll just say that I despise Joe Torre. He's an overrated manager who's always been propped up by his players, coasted on his reputation far too much, will cut the throat of anyone around him, and probably cost the team at least one championship…maybe more. He's in Dusty Baker territory to me.
I intentionally ran THIS posting before the two recent ones, which just goes to show who really rules NY: Jeter.
Jeter can do no wrong, even with his impressive dating resume. ARod got married, cheated with Madonna and some bodybuilder in Toronto.
Jeter will always walk on water while ARod needs waterwings. Fair or not.
Jeter will always be viewed as "our guy" while ARod's second fiddle, even if ARod's been blessed with greater natural talents.
And, at the end of the day, they managed to work well together for at least one season and win a title. This, my friends, is the point.
Jason,
You are correct in everything you just said – that being said if you and everyone else in NY can recognize this you shouldn't get mad when other people outside of Yankee fandom call Jeter overrated. That is the definition of overrated – he can do no wrong even when he stinks like this year or like in 2008 when they missed the playoffs while Arod is lambasted after a couple bad games after winning the 2007 MVP – something Jeter has never done by the way.
One more quick point that ties in with Jeter, Alex, and putting the team first. Jeter is a great player and I love him, and I don't fault Yankees fans for loving him at all, but there is simply no argument to be made that he was a better shortstop than Alex when the Yankees acquired the latter. Yet it was always accepted that A-Rod was moving to 3rd, and so far as I know Alex never complained about it, certainly not publicly. Now, consummate-team-first-player Jeter easily could have gone to Torre and insisted on moving to 3rd so that the better player could man the more important position, but he didn't. I certainly don't fault Jeter for that at all, my point is that A-Rod has never gotten enough credit for this. The guy was expressing humility and deference the second he arrived on the team by switching positions so that Jeter could stay at short, even though A-Rod was better.
Bret: The "overrated" stuff doesn't have to do with "doing no wrong". People who disparage him do so in looking at his #'s. That he didn't hit enough HR, that he wasn't Ozzie Smith in the field.
But overall, Jeter's played to win first and foremost and that showed through at all times. Personal stats never, ever seemed to be a concern for Jeter.
Personal anecdote: My son K's three times in his 2nd to last game and came off the field in tears. Yet the team was winning (and would win the game). I pulled him aside and asked him: "Do you think Derek Jeter gets upset if he K's three times but the team wins?" His answer was simply "No."
Played to win is not quantifiable – it is like saying someone worked hard or had a good personality. Yankee fans give Jeter so much credit for standing on the top step of the dugout to greet home run hitters or being great in the clubhouse. His lack of production in 2008 maybe cost them the playoffs and he is a major reason this year that they aren't pulling away – every good thing he does is amplified and every negative thing is ignored. He has been a very good player but I wouldn't call him elite – like Cal Ripken most of his accomplishments (3000 hits etc.) are based more on longevity than on consistent excellent production. I am a lifelong O's fan but it used to drive me crazy when Ripken had terrible years, started every All Star game and the fans fawned over him. And Jeter makes him look underappreciated by comparison.
"Personal anecdote: My son K’s three times in his 2nd to last game and came off the field in tears. Yet the team was winning (and would win the game). I pulled him aside and asked him: “Do you think Derek Jeter gets upset if he K’s three times but the team wins?” His answer was simply “No."
That's a great tool for telling kids, but is it really true? Or maybe more importantly, are you happy if it's true? Jeter is swinging at more pitches out of the zone this year; if he strikes out three times because of it, would you really be happy to find out that he doesn't care about that so long as his team wins?
This is where I think writers over-apply the narratives and memes of team sports to baseball, which is ultimately about a series of individual contests. It's a "team" sport more in the sense that amateur wrestling is, more so than football or even basketball.
All I can say is that I hope (wish) Alex would hit a few grand slams this weekend – enough to bury Torre. He won't – if for no other reason than because he will be trying so hard to do just that, he'll be chasing out of the zone and striking out at a Jeter-esque rate.
Torre was good – but his version of history in his "tell-all" has to be some of the most revisionist fiction I've read or seen, dating all the way back to my favorite episode of MASH. The one with the court martial, where Frank tells his story, Hawkeye tells his story, and then we get to see the real story. The only difference is that this is real life, and we'll never see the real story.
I thought the world of Torre right up to the time when I read his book. The current running joke that is the Dodger's management – couldn't happen to a better guy.
Joe Torre – class act, quality manager, he is missed…
But it's hard to complain when you are the defending world champs and have the best record in baseball
"The Yankee Years" was nowhere near as controversial as people try to make it out to be.
Was there one thing in the book that wasn't already well known to us fans who follow the team closely enough? I can't think of anything.
As for Arod, I lost whatever tiny amount of sympathy I had for him when he was outed as a steroid cheat
So spare me the "poor Arod" card. I root for him because he's a yankee and that's enough
Now, consummate-team-first-player Jeter easily could have gone to Torre and insisted on moving to 3rd so that the better player could man the more important position, but he didn’t
1. Arod was a much better fit for third base than Jeter
2. Jeter belives he's the best player on the field at all times, "the better player" DID stay at shortstop
As a lifelong Yankee fan who grew up on Long Island, I've been a big Torre fan for years. I can honestly say, however, that Torre's comments in his book shocked and saddened me.
I think what was in that book was an unbelieveable breach of manager-player trust. Torre isn't the same in my eyes because of his book. It was as if Torre was taking the opportunity to strike back at the Yanks because of the way he left the organization. There are better ways to do that! Hold a press conference and tell everyone what really happened behind closed doors…then move on.
He has every right to feel angry about the negotiations that eventually led to his departure from the team, but writing a "tell all" book is not the way to go. Torre ignored the high road (something he was great at during his tenure as Yankee manager, even when the Boss would get all over Torre on the back pages) and tried to go out with a bang, TMZ-style.
I'm glad we now have Girardi. He seems to handle situations the way Torre USED to, with class and dignity. He never blew up about losing the Marlins gig and wrote a book about them, which was something he could have done. Instead, he's now managing the World Champions while Torre has to deal with the Dodgers and their crappy ownership (not to mention "Manny being Manny").
I'm asking politely.
For those of you who keep referencing this "tell all" book, can you please tell me what exactly was in the book that we didn't already know about?
Stop letting the media form your thoughts for you
Brian R. – have you read the book? I have. And afaic, the most lurid outtakes that were printed in "the media" read even worse in context. Since I'm evidently not as intimately plugged into the Yankees as you, there were a lot of things in the book I was not aware of, and many things that seem like unsubstantiated cheap shots. Just mho. I did respect the hell out of Torre. Not so much anymore. You're welcome to your opinion, too.
Of course i read the book. To me it was a classic example of media driven controversey. As opposed to REAL controversey. But, to each his own.
Even if the book did not bring anything new to the table — a statement with which I do not agree — It was in poor taste at best, and certainly an example of hypocracy…not to mention Torre then deflecting responsibility in favor of Verducci's "investigative reporting". To me, it was an example of Torre-driven controversy. There was absolutely no need for that book to be written. But I forget: It's about the money, stupid. So I just answered my own implicit question.
Now, consummate-team-first-player Jeter easily could have gone to Torre and insisted on moving to 3rd so that the better player could man the more important position, but he didn’t
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OH,please…….
That's the most reason why I dislike A-rod !!
As long as A-rod fans can Stop stuff like this , I will appreciate you.
Give a dog a bad name and hang him!
of course A-rod easily could have gone to Torre and tell him HE CAN'T HIT IN THE PLAYOFF, BAT HIM EIGHT!!
of course TEX easily could have gone to Girarrdi and tell him HE SUCK THIS YEAR, BAT HIM NIGHT!!
of course YOU easily could have gone to YOUR BOSS and tell him GIVE THE NEW GUY MY JOB , HE DID BETTER!!
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The A-ROD deal is already a shot to him .
He has to deal with those nonsense,DRAMA,attack,……
JETER IS the poor guy.