Torre Knew St. Louis Job Had Flaws, but He Likes ‘the View’

It certainly helped that he once bled red and that he didn’t sit in the professor’s chair for nearly a month after the professor left.

“I’m not Whitey Herzog,” Joe Torre explained on his return to the field, beginning with the obvious. “But it’s not like I’m a stranger in St. Louis, either.”

It is a breezy Tuesday night in Wrigley Field, six days into the reign of Joseph Paul Torre, Cardinals manager. The electricity of the pennant race is elsewhere, crackling in towns hundreds of miles away. Yet every few minutes Torre doffs his cap to let the wind run through thinning black hair and over the goose bumps raised by his reception in St. Louis a few evenings earlier.

He walked out to home plate Friday night with the lineup card, exactly as Whitey had for most of the last 11 seasons, and wasn’t sure whether they would remember him as he thought of himself--the old soldier coming home. But most of the 40,000 got to their feet and almost all of them put their hands together, and the buzz was still with him after five days.

“Sure, there was some insecurity,” Torre said, “but I had some pretty good years there and the people there remember. They know I’m not trying to follow Whitey, and I’m not trying to make people forget.

“And they’ll find out eventually what I’m capable of.”

No doubt. Torre turned 50 last month, a little too wizened to pass this move off as the solution to a mid-life crisis, and inquiring minds want to know why.

Why, after six years, chuck a soft job in the television booth for Gene Autry’s Angels to take on the aggravation of running the Anheuser-Busch brewery’s last-place Cardinals? To be second-guessed by everybody in the organization except the Clydesdales.

Why take on a team that, at times, has played bad enough to make strong men weep and made Herzog, baseball’s last certifiable genius, drop the pieces, dust off his hands and walk away shaking his head?

Especially a team with as many as 10 players, among them outfielders Vince Coleman and Willie McGee, third baseman Terry Pendleton and pitchers John Tudor and Ken Dayley--names associated with the salad days of the 1980s, who may be gone via free agency when the team collects again next spring?

“I know, I know,” Torre chuckled, then extended his arms to the sides and cupped his hands to imitate a scale.

“On this side,” he said, nodding to the left, “you’ve got everything. A really good job broadcasting in a big market, a comfortable life in California, my wife happy that I’m home most nights, good hours, lots of golf, everything.

“But this side says Cardinals on it,” he nodded to the right, “and that was enough to tip it. . . . I’ll tell you what. I remember when Richie Allen came over to St. Louis in 1970. He had lots of run-ins where he’d been, all that stuff, and the first time he walked out in St. Louis, he got a two-minute standing ovation.

“Every time it seemed like it was going to die out, it started up again. Talk about a guy having chills,” Torre recalled, “and I wasn’t even involved.”

The longer he goes on, the easier it becomes to understand why all three of the organizations that employed him as a field hand (the Braves, Mets and now Cardinals) have been willing to re-hire Torre as a field manager.

He is loyal. He works hard. He speaks well. He is a proven former ballplayer, which never hurts in trying to resurrect a proud team. And so the question remains: What’s in it for him?

Pressed, Torre will admit that he wants the World Series ring he never got, that he wanted to measure himself against this challenge at this age rather than moan about passing it up five years from now. And yet, he always comes back to this business of bleeding Cardinal red.

Torre’s history in the town by the Mississippi goes back to 1969 when he got traded from the Braves to the Cardinals for Orlando Cepeda, an All-Star who had helped nudge the franchise into the World Series the two previous years.

He was 28 years old at the time, and while Torre brought a good enough bat along--in eight seasons, he never got lost in a Braves lineup that included Henry Aaron--he was scared he might not live up to the expectations.

As it turned out, he exceeded them, claiming a batting title and the NL Most Valuable Player award in 1971. Perhaps equally important, Torre learned a lesson.

“Bad rumors followed me around for years, but they never got directly to me,” he recalled. “After I’d been in St. Louis a few years, somebody came up to me said, ‘You’re not a troublemaker.’

“I never thought I was, but I decided then and there I wasn’t going to let that affect how I judged other people. That’s stayed with me ever since.”

Needless to say, he heard a lot of rumors about the guys he inherited. Herzog’s calculating charm and a stream of mea culpas issuing from the locker room after his resignation and interim Manager Red Schoendienst’s monthlong tenure saw to that.

So Torre spent his first days on the job in a series of one-on-one meetings, demanding from each ballplayer full concentration on the field and guaranteeing each ballplayer peace away from it in return.

Whether he will prove there is life after Whitey or not, that seemed to Torre the Cardinal way of doing things. Though Tuesday night’s loss to Chicago dropped his record to 4-2 and brought him closer to reality after devastating the contending Mets during his first weekend on the job, it did little to alter his perspective.

“I guess I just realized that I like the view better from this dugout,” Torre said, running his hand along the padded bench, “than anywhere else in the park.”