When I was on the subway the other day, I heard a young teenage boy discussing Joe Torre’s “The Yankee Years” with his mother. The kid called Torre a “snitch.”
In an appearance on the Michael Kay Show yesterday, David Wells called his old manager “a punk” and threatened to punch him.
Is that going to be Torre’s legacy now? From Joey Four Rings to Torre the Snitch? Hope he enjoys all that money he’s getting from trashing the clubhouse code.
Ian O’Connor, who has written very critically about Alex Rodriguez in the past, said that Torre had even more negative things to say about A-Rod:
Torre co-authored a book that, among many other things, reveals that Rodriguez was known as “A-Fraud” in his own clubhouse.
Torre neglected to mention that he would call A-Rod a five-letter word far more degrading than “fraud” before fellow members of the Yankee family.
Some leader of men, eh?
I have to say, I’m really enjoying reading all the revelations of the real Joe Torre coming out this week. It’s so delicious to see the curtain revealed to show what a phony St. Joe really is.
Heck, even Mike Mussina, who cooperated with the book, is ripping Joe for violating the code.
“Joe has started something that a lot of people are going to have to answer to,” Mussina told the Bergen Record’s Bob Klapisch. “Joe’s going to have to answer to it too, but it won’t be as bad for him because he’s with the Dodgers now. But it’s going to be bad for the guys he left behind.”
Mussina also told Klapisch:
“As a ballplayer you need to know who you have to watch out for and who you can trust. First and foremost, you should be able to trust your manager.
“I mean, people knew that Brown was out there, and that Randy was ornery all the time. And Pavano is whoever he is. But if you’re their manager, you can’t go out and write about them like that.”
Incidentally, I highly recommend checking out the entire Klapisch column – it’s a good read.
I don’t think Mussina violated the clubhouse code with his own quotes in the book – he just did his usual sardonic and snippy observations – but I do wonder why he cooperated with it at all. Maybe it was to defend the non-rings guys.
Michael Kay has been flipping out all week about what Moose said in the book about Mariano Rivera. I think what Mussina was trying to say, in a very inept way, is that if Mo had held on to get the save in 2004, that we would have a very different opinion of those years. But the post-2000 guys are the ones always get the blame for the playoff failures.
When asked about what Mussina said, Jeff Nelson said on MLB Network the old adage about how you win as a team, and lose as a team. And he’s right.
But did Torre believe that? Given the way he’s acted over the years, and the way he negatively described every player who wasn’t this guy, I don’t think so.
So much for Joe being able to keep all those egos at bay. A good manager would have never let all the “us vs. them” stuff happen on his own team. But Joe didn’t just allow this stuff to go on – he encouraged it, fed off of it, and now has made money writing about it. Classy!
What do you think? Leave us a comment!
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