Squawker Jon, I will announce later on this morning who I’m rooting for in your Mets-Red Sox series this weekend. Have to keep our readers coming back for more!
But in the meantime, I have to chastise your team for letting themselves get swept by the Dodgers this week. Even the usually-snoozing Joe Torre roused himself out of a nap to notice that Ryan Church didn’t touch third base. Torre went out onto the field and argued about it and everything. Imagine if he had done the same during the Bug Game when Joba Chamberlain was literally screaming, “I can’t see”!
And your team couldn’t even knock around Jeff Weaver! I don’t want to go all Steve Phillips on you, but what’s wrong with the Mets?
Anyhow, I wonder how that Torre-Weaver thing is going, given the negative things Torre said about him in “The Yankee Years.” I also wonder if Weaver, or for that matter, David Wells, noticed this passage from the book. On Page 49 of “The Yankee Years,” Torre complained about David Wells being a bad influence on Weaver:
[Wells] can be an engaging personality, and then there are times as a manager where you could hate his guts. He’d go out there and I’d watch his body language, and I’d watch Jeff Weaver and I’d watch Sidney Ponson, those are two guys who gravitated toward him, and I saw the same things. ‘Woe is me.’ It drove you nuts.
Wow, Wells’ bad influence is amazing. Especially given that he and Sidney Ponson were never teammates. Ponson didn’t join the Yankees until 2006, three seasons after Wells was off the team. You gotta love Joe’s attention to detail there.
Torre also botched the name of the Yankee who got the game-winning hit in Game 1 of the 2000 World Series. Not one, not twice, but three different times in the book, the player is named Luis Vizcaino, not Jose Vizcaino. Luis, a pitcher, didn’t play for the Yankees until 2007. Maybe this error explains why Torre overworked Luis Vizcaino so much in the bullpen that year – he thought he could get some of that old World Series magic!
In addition to these sloppy errors in “The Yankee Years,” Torre still tries to justify pitching Weaver in extra innings in the 2003 World Series. From Page 234:
“I had no options,” Torre said. “People say bring in Mariano. I had no options. It was an extra-inning game on the road. There was never any consideration of other options. I never was between anybody, I know that….”
Yeah, it’s a tough choice. Who do you pitch in a World Series game – the greatest closer of all time, or Jeff Weaver? Then again, this is Joe Torre we’re talking about, the guy who spends most of “The Yankee Years” complaining of the horrible burden of having the best player in baseball on his team!
Torre also said this about Weaver:
“People were basing their criticism of him in Game 4 on what happened before, when he was bad. But we finally got him to the point where he was controlling his emotions better. But the result reverted to what he was before, so people say, “It’s the same old guy.”
This is just nonsense. Torre hadn’t had Weaver pitch in 28 days. He thought so little of his abilities that he never used Weaver in the entire postseason until Game 4 of the World Series. Six years later, the wrongheadedness of this decision still boggles my mind.
But that’s Teflon Torre – he’s completely incapable of ever acknowledging that he did anything wrong. Just this week, he refused to acknowledge any culpability regarding Scott Proctor. Torre overworked Proctor so much with both the Yankees and the Dodgers, that Proctor had to get season-ending elbow surgery this week. Torre’s overwork of Proctor was so legendary, a Yankee fan site called Scott Proctor’s Arm was named after it!
But does St. Joe regret what he did to Proctor? Of course not. Torre told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel this week:
“There’s playing hurt, and then there’s playing stupid,” Torre said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with someone’s intelligence. If you can endure pain and still are able to do what you do, that’s one thing.”
“If you’re willing to play, which means you certainly are brave, but you can’t be the player that you need to be, then it’s not very smart to do for your own health, and you’re not helping the team either,” Torre said.
You’d think Torre would have realized he was overworking Proctor after the time the pitcher set his equipment on fire after a loss. But maybe that’s just me.
Torre continued:
“He doesn’t know what hurt is,” Torre said. “The dumbest question I could ask him was: ‘Are you OK?’ Because I knew what the answer was going to be.”
Then why did Torre keep on pitching him, when he knew this about Proctor?
Of course, expecting anybody to actually ask Torre a tough question on this is a futile endeavor. He’s got four rings, after all!
And we only have one year until Teflon Torre’s triumphant return to the Bronx, when the Dodgers play the Yankees in interleague play. Jeez, I just can’t wait.
What do you think about Joe Torre? Tell us about it!
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