“What has set apart the Torre era is not just
winning but a sense of attachment and identification that he effortlessly
inspired among the fans and the players and the millions of sports bystanders.
Already known by the fans as a strong-swinging Brooklyn-born catcher (and,
later, a third baseman) with an eighteen-year career with the Braves, the
Cardinals, and the Mets, and then for his long tenure as a semi-distinguished
manager of the same three teams, he became a sudden celebrity, a Page Six
sweetheart, in his first season with the Yankees, when his brother Frank Torre,
another former major leaguer, underwent successful heart-replacement surgery
the day before the last game of the World Series. The fourth game, in which the
Yankees, trailing the Braves by 2–1 in the Series and 6–0 on the scoreboard,
came back to win in extra innings, beginning their rush to the championship,
changed New York to a Yankee town overnight. Torre’s composure and steadiness
in hard times became as familiar as his odd, tilting trudge from the dugout to
the mound to call in a fresh pitcher. A habitual modesty interwoven with an
awareness of the difficult daily grind powerfully secured him to his players.
Whenever someone brought up the batting title and National League M.V.P. award
he had captured in 1971 with a .363 average, he threw in a reminder about his
.289 mark the following year. Mid-July often brought on a retelling of a game
of his as a Mets third baseman in 1975, when he batted into four double plays
and also committed an error. This ease with himself and his profession set the
tone in his pre-game and post-game press conferences, delivered every day to
thirty or forty writers, plus TV and radio and Japan.”—New Yorker fiction editor and baseball writer Roger Angell, “Comment: So Long, Joe,” The New Yorker, November 5, 2007
When I heard a few days ago, as I had hoped for the
last few years, that Joe Torre had
been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, there really was only one baseball
writer whom I wanted for a “Quote of the Day” about the former Yankee manager.
On more than one occasion, Roger Angell has written lyrically about what he called “the web
of the game,” in a classic piece on a collegiate mound deal between future
big-leaguers Ron Darling and Frank Viola.
But six years ago, as the New York Yankees allowed Torre to walk
away from the job, under circumstances they mistakenly hoped to spin to their advantage, Angell--perhaps inspired by the example of his subject’s “habitual modesty”--turned in
a piece more subdued than usual for him but equally inspired.
It aptly capturing the qualities, “composure and
steadiness in hard times,” that lent the Torre-led Yankees what they had not
enjoyed in 20 prior years under George Steinbrenner: normality. (Is it any wonder
that the manager’s relationship with the diva-ish Alex Rodriguez was so
uneasy?)
The Bronx Bombers have long since mended fences with
Torre, and, following the news of the Hall of Fame enshrinement, they have
taken the rapprochement with their former skipper to the next level by announcing they will retire
his number.
(The blogger at Bleeding Yankee Blue speaks for many of us when he
wonders about the possibility that the Yankee brass might one day also honor the
“Core Four” who came to prominence under Torre—Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera,
Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada—who would “stand at the mound on George
Steinbrenner's birthday [July 4] and have their numbers retired together.”)
As it happens, Cooperstown is joining the Yankees in
correcting an injustice, though hardly as stinging a one.
For years, the
Baseball Writers' Association of America did not include Angell on its roster
because membership was largely confined to writers who either cover baseball
full time or write about the game for a newspaper, news service or
major website. Angell’s ad hoc pieces at The New Yorker (where, of course, he
labored for years as a fiction editor) somehow didn’t count, no matter how
graceful.
Now, however, these baseball scribes have fittingly voted to give Angell its annual J.G. Taylor Spink award for "meritorious contributions to baseball writing." A long time coming, and infinitely well deserved.
(The photo
accompanying this post—of Torre in another pennant race in September 2005,
heading to the dugout after changing pitchers—illustrates the kind of walk to
which Angell refers in the above quote.)
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