Tell George Where To Go, Joe

I don’t know if I’ll be able to get this post out in time before anything happens, and I should have said something before now, but New York Yankees manager Joe Torre should tell George Steinbrenner what he can do with his threats about Torre losing his job.

Joe Torre is a legend in major league baseball, having played and managed in the game for over 40 years. As a player, he was a National League All Star from 1963 to 1967, playing both catcher and third base in his career. In 1971 (as noted here by Wikipedia), he led the NL in two triple crown categories - RBIs (137) and batting average (.363) - as well as in hits (230) and total bases (352). He was also 2nd in the NL in on base percentage (.421), 3rd in slugging percentage (.555), doubles (34), and intentional walks (20), and 5th in runs (97) and triples (8). Batting cleanup all season, he hit .413 in games that were late and close. He was named the NL's Most Valuable Player, as well as Major League Player of The Year by both The Sporting News and Baseball Digest.

There was a period in the early ‘70s when I can recall that the Phillies had an opportunity to trade for him, and I hoped very much that they would do so. However, they never did; who’s to say that would have been the right move, though.

As a manager, he won four World Series titles with the Yankees. And apart from baseball, he and his wife Ali founded the Joe Torre Safe At Home Foundation, which operates a dozen domestic violence resource centers (collectively called Margaret House, after Torre’s mother) across New York City and Westchester County, New York, with the first New Jersey location at Union City's Jose Marti Middle School having opened this month.

So why a man who has accomplished so much in his career, particularly for the Yankees, should now have to wait out some kind of public job termination at the hands of another corporate egomaniac (another tyrant named George) is something so cruel to me as to defy understanding.

Regardless of what happens, let me take this opportunity to thank Torre for representing the game with excellence as well as class and distinction, even though he spent way too much time for an organization that apparently doesn’t know the meaning of those words.

And if it turns out that Torre is fired, no one should ever support the Yankees again.

Update 10/18: Typically gutless move by Steinbrenner, knowing Torre wouldn't accept a pay cut, and in the nutty, inside-out world of sports salaries, why should he?