Torre: Another Blow to Yankees

This was last November, not even a full month from when the Yankees had won the World Series again, and Joe Torre was in a television studio at Chelsea Piers, waiting to make a cameo appearance on “Spin City.” It was a Friday night, a couple of weeks before Michael J. Fox, the popular star of that show, would announce that he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, news as shocking then as the news Wednesday that Torre himself is suffering from prostate cancer.

But on this night, there was no bad news anywhere, just more of the afterglow of the baseball season in New York. There was just Torre bringing the Yankees with him to Pier 61, Stage D. It was as if he had come straight here from the Yankees parade on lower Broadway. He sat with the actors and people from the crew, told stories, signed everything, posed for pictures.

In a quiet moment later, he was asked if he ever got tired of what had become the best role of his baseball life, and not just in a television sitcom: Manager of the Yankees.

“Never,” he said.

He smiled and, as always, it seemed to soften all the dark shadows of his face.

“You have to understand something,” Joe Torre said. “None of this was supposed to happen to me.”

Now, cancer has happened to him. Another cancer story around the Yankees. Last October, just as the playoffs were starting, Darryl Strawberry was diagnosed with colon cancer. It was not so long after that when we found out that it wasn’t pneumonia that had kept Joe DiMaggio from throwing out the first pitch of the World Series, it was the lung cancer that finally took him Monday.

And between one season and the next, between the World Series and the spring, came the news that Jim (Catfish) Hunter was suffering from ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. A Yankee great of our time being diagnosed with the terrible illness named after one of the great Yankees of all time. Even in the best of times, there have always been these dramas at the Stadium.

Now, out of Florida, comes the news about Torre, on the day when Strawberry, undergoing chemotherapy, made his first appearance in a spring training game, against the Red Sox in Fort Myers.

“Not him,” Joe Torre said when he found out Strawberry had cancer. “Not now.”

But cancer plays no favorites. It does not spare old legends like DiMaggio, it does not spare sluggers making comebacks, like Strawberry, who turned 37 Friday. It does not spare Torre, out of St. Francis Prep in Brooklyn, manager of the Yankees, who came home to finally have the time of his baseball life.

We have spent the week talking about DiMaggio’s style on a ballfield. There has never been a Yankee manager who brought the kind of style Torre has to the Yankee dugout.

When Sparky Anderson was nearing the end of his career with the Tigers, I asked him one spring if he still loved managing.

“More than ever,” he said. “You want to know why? Because I know how to do it.”

That is Torre with the Yankees. He is the pro in complete command of himself, his game. He waited forever, worked so many bad ballclubs and finally got a dream team like this. When he did, he knew exactly what to do with it.

His first Yankee season ended with a World Series for him and a new heart for his brother Frank. Everybody remembers that drama. Now, another medical drama in the family. After the best season any Yankee manager ever had, comes a different kind of season, however the Yankees finish. Everybody who knows him says today what he said about Darryl Strawberry last October: Not him. And not now.

After all the good things that weren’t supposed to happen to Joe Torre, now this.