Torre's Out Whoring

*I wanted to use "Say it ain't so, Joe", but that's pretty lame. I like this title best.*

"Classy" Joe Torre went all Jose Canseco on us and wrote a tell-all titled "The Yankee Years". The book, written with help from Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated, contains a few juicy bits of gossip in regard to Brian Cashman and Alex Rodriguez. Apparently Joe felt Brian shortchanged him on the way and didn't fight hard to retain his services. Also, some players on the Yankees have called A-Rod A-Fraud. Ooooooh! Scandalous.

Whatever, Joe. Maybe if you stopped using Mo in the 7th and 8th inning you'd still be here. Maybe if you didn't wear out guys like Scott Proctor with daily appearances in game-changing situations you'd of won more regular season games. If Scott Proctor was a dog, Torre would be serving time with Mike Vick for animal abuse.

I respect the Joe Torre era. Don't get me wrong. But the success of the bullpen in 2008 was the forgotten story last year, especially after many years of late-season breakdowns under Torre's watch. Parts of Joe's book are pretty much in line with my thinking though. For example, Torre calls out “big boppers” like Jason Giambi, who the manager felt “wasn’t part of what we prided ourselves on: playing well defensively.” And the decision to get Giambi "made for a whole different dynamic in the Yankees’ clubhouse."

You'll never see me defend Giambi and it's both surprising and refreshing to see Joe take the dancing gold thong bear thing that was Giambi to task. But, at the end of the day, Joe really should've done his job as a manager and taken control of his clubhouse. There were many instances in which Jason, recovering from injury, could've been the DH exclusively and the defensive issue would've been alleviated. I was pretty much clamoring for it during and after the 2003 season. And if you want to talk about defensive pride, what the hell was Chuck "I can't throw the ball from second" Knoblauch doing out there everyday?

A-Rod does get a lot of abuse. From the book: “Whether hitting 450-foot home runs or sunbathing shirtless in Central Park or squiring strippers, Rodriguez was like nothing ever seen before on the championship teams of the Torre Era: an ambitious superstar impressed and motivated by stature and status, particularly when those qualities pertained to himself.” Fair enough. A-Rod's a primadonna, but he's our primadonna, nothing really surprises me about him anymore.

Surprisingly absent form the book is the number of Yankees form the successful Torre years who took steroids, HGH, and other PEDs. The Mitchell report was a who's who of some of my old Yankee heroes from the '96 - '00 run. I guess it's easier to slam the guys you couldn't win with than the guys who injected ability into their asses and won you some notoriety.

Let's remember, before the Yankees, Joe was nothing more than a .500 manager. 14 years later he's a legend. Now he's just an old guy in a LA Dodgers Halloween costume. Read the articles about the book. They have all the interesting stuff anyway.