Fire Torre? The Curse of Playoff Thinking

Major League Baseball's playoffs are the sport's biggest stage and top marketing tool. It's just too bad they set discussion about baseball back 50 years each fall and turn normally reasonable fans and analysts alike into blithering idiots.

Nowhere is "playoff thinking" more evident than in the Bronx, where anything less than a World Series championship is utter failure. This fall, the debate was over the Bombers' "absolutely unacceptable" performance and the implications for manager Joe Torre's job status.
Would the Boss replace Torre? Who would be the successor? Would Torre, George Steinbrenner, and Alex Rodriguez settle their differences in a three-man steel cage match during the offseason?

Ultimately, Steinbrenner reaffirmed his faith in Torre, telling his 11-year manager that he would return for a 12th season. The latter announced the news in what can only be described as a bittersweet press conference for Torre, who, but for a last-minute change of heart at the top of the organization, could have been relaxing on his couch at this time next year and watching some poor schmuck (Joe Girardi, perhaps?) dance and sweat under the Boss's deranged eye.

But this isn't about what Joe Torre could be doing next October — it's about what the Yankees' recent postseason shortcomings and the associated hype does to brainpower across the country (namely, shrinking it by a factor of eight) and how the debate over Torre's job would look if cool reason were applied to the Yankees' personnel decisions for once (here's a hint: the debate wouldn't exist).

Don't Forget How Good He Never Was...

Before you dig into Torre's performance as the Yankees' skipper, it's important to know who he was for the 12 years before he got the Yankees job — unless, of course, you're one of those (we call them "Yankee buffoons," and it's not a term of endearment) who believes that those first 12 years are in the past and have nothing to tell us about Torre's skills as a manager, because the move to the Bronx included some sort of brain transplant. If you're one of those people, then feel free to skip this next section, skip the rest of the article and instead start concentrating on what the Knicks' season is going to be like with Isiah Thomas at the helm.

Before arriving in New York, Torre had managed the New York Mets, Atlanta Braves, and St. Louis Cardinals with significantly less success than you might expect from a guy who currently owns four World Series rings. The Mets job was a disaster — Torre's teams went 286-420 (.405) over five glorious seasons, cementing Joe as one of the worst managers in the big leagues.

Miraculously, Torre's utter lack of success inspired the Braves' front office to decide he was the man to lead their team to the promised land. Also rather miraculously, Torre reached the playoffs for the first time in his career during three seasons in which Atlanta went 257-229 (.529). Some learning curve, huh? Maybe he's just a late bloomer, huh?

Well, if he is, he's a real late bloomer, because after leaving the Braves, six seasons in St. Louis netted a 351-354 record and zero postseason appearances.

So let's see if we've got this right. Fourteen seasons of major league managing experience, a .471 winning percentage, and zero postseason victories. Well, if that's not a resume that screams "Hall of Fame managerial acumen," I don't know what is.

The point is that nothing about Joe Torre's first 14 seasons suggests that his skills are anything surpassing mediocre. Not that all the losing was his fault, of course. Most of it wasn't. Those Mets teams were brutal and basically beyond rescue.

At the same time, nothing about Torre's next 11 seasons in New York suggest anything in way of unusual talent or incompetence, either. Eleven years, a .607 winning percentage with the best players in the league and roughly 40 games per year against the lowly Devil Rays and Orioles, and four World Series titles.

So, when folks in New York were ready to make Joe the next Catholic saint in 2000 when he won his third consecutive championship, they were singing the praises of a guy who had amassed a grand total of five winning seasons before joining Big George's record-setting payrolls. Joe Torre is a manager who, over 25 seasons, has won with good talent and lost with bad. Nothing more, nothing less. That's the background.

A Playoff Choker? Hardly

But the debate over Torre's skills and future in New York isn't about his regular season record. Eleven seasons in the Bronx have yielded 10 playoff berths and nine in a row. Nobody's teams run the regular season marathon like Torre's boys, but then again, the regular season is hardly the point in New York, is it? Nope, it's Torre's inability to win the big one that had the phone lines buzzing at every Big Apple radio station and national commentators saying it was time for a change.

This is where it really gets comical. In his time with the Yankees, Torre has won at a .607 clip overall. In the playoffs, that figure improves to .630. That's right, crazy Yankees fan. That bumbling idiot is better when it counts than he is during the regular season. If managers were capable of such a thing, you might call him clutch. Except he hasn't been clutch lately, has he? Oh, no. As the Yankees' payroll has grown, their postseason success rate has shrunk, and after a torrid start to his tenure during which his teams won four championships in a five-year span, Torre's last six seasons have passed without a title.

So what happened? Did Joe get dumb? Did he lose the ability to get the most out of his players? Has he been sabotaged by a lineup that just doesn't have the same hunger as those 1998 and 1999 teams?

Uh, it's called "regression to the mean," folks, and it's going to happen, no matter who's managing the team. In his first 10 postseason series, Torre posted a 35-10 record for a winning percentage of .778. And that's against other postseason teams. Guess what, Yankees fan? Your teams were good, but they weren't that good. That was the kind of success that a team can have over a 45-game period, but not forever, and we're starting to find out that even the great Joe Torre (see if you can find anybody at Shea Stadium who will put those three words together) isn't immune to the power of averages.

Over his past four postseason series, Torre has a record of 10-11, a function not of how poorly he has managed, but of the realities of baseball: it was going to be impossible to keep up a .750+ winning percentage forever. This is the kind of thing anybody with a math degree and a modicum of baseball sense could have predicted six years ago.

These Ain't Your 1998 Yankees

Last thing. Let's take a look at this year's Yankees team quickly, shall we? As long as there have been playoff series, there has been a pretty obvious truth about what types of teams succeed. Here's a hint: it's not always, or even frequently, the best team. It's the team that can author multiple dominating pitching performances in a short period of time. Randy Johnson's and Curt Schilling's ability to carry the otherwise inferior 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks over the Yankees proves this point pretty clearly.

Now take a peek at the 2006 Yankees and specifically the pitchers who trotted out to the mound to face off against the Tigers' lineup. A wobbly Mike Mussina, a geriatric Johnson, Chien-Mien Wang, and Jaret Wright? Your most dominant arm (Wang) strikes out fewer than five hitters per nine innings, and the guy starting your elimination game (Wright) has pitched a total of one solid season in his career.

What part of this is Joe Torre's fault? If there's anybody who should be sweating bullets, it's general manager Brian Cashman for his inability to generate a stronger starting rotation with $200 million at his disposal. Despite assurances across baseball that he's one of the game's best, the Yankees found their two most reliable players (Wang and Robinson Cano) by accident and still don't have anybody who can actually play first base.

What part of this is Joe Torre's fault?

When October 2007 rolls around, Torre's Yankees will once again be in the playoffs and likely be the best team on paper. Will they win it all? Maybe. Maybe not. If they do, Joe Torre will once again be the smartest guy in baseball (and Steinbrenner by extension, for retaining him). If not, I'll have another column to write.