Dodgers’ Joe Torre gets blunt reminder
He looks older this weekend. He just does.
With his former team strutting in front of his weary eyes, with his current team struggling behind his sagging back, Joe Torre seems strained by the tug between past and future.
He looks like a lame duck this weekend. He just does.
The tumbling of the New York Yankees into his world, however briefly, seems to remind Torre of two ominous signposts that line what could be the final miles of his Dodgers career.
He left the most well-funded, championship-minded body in professional sports for a team that cannot even buy him a winning arm. He traveled to the other side of the baseball world in hopes of closing a gap that has only grown larger.
Despite the Dodgers 9-4 victory over the Yankees on Saturday at Dodger Stadium — knotting the weekend revival series at a game apiece — the guess here is that Torre is being reminded of everything he is not.
He is not the manager of a team that currently has title aspirations. He is not the manager of an organization that always spends whatever it takes. As he approaches his 70th birthday next month, he is not in a place where it would be graceful to grow old.
If the Dodgers’ management doesn’t use the rest of the summer to prove otherwise, why on Earth would he want to come back?
Torre said something earlier this year that was stunning in its resonance. The quote was buried under all the words being piled on the Lakers but deserves to be pulled out now.
Torre said it in early May, a day after Charlie Haeger became the first Dodgers starter in 22 years to fail to record an out.
“You have to be realistic about it,” Torre said in a pregame news gathering. “For us to win games and win without a consistent pitching staff is lucky.”
Lucky? The Dodgers’ manager believed that the only way his team could win was with luck? The subtle Torre couldn’t have been clearer about his future here, and the Dodgers have done little to change that view.
The starters still ranked an embarrassing 11th in the National League in earned-run average before Saturday, and the Dodgers remain one of only two teams in the league without a complete game despite playing in one of the league’s most pitcher-friendly parks.
Even in the win by Hiroki Kuroda on Saturday, he needed 110 pitches to get through 5 1/3 innings and required rescuing by Hong-Chih Kuo in the sixth inning after leaving with a couple of runners on base.
As Torre said, you have to be realistic about it. If the Dodgers front office wants to keep the man who led them to within three wins of the World Series in the last two seasons, they have to stop being lucky and start being good.
If they want to keep Torre, they have to get Seattle’s Cliff Lee or Houston’s Roy Oswalt, or someone else with broad shoulders and a big arm. If they want him to commit the rest of his career to them, they must commit the rest of the season to him.
It’s that simple. Buy an ace pitcher, own a Hall of Fame manager. Give Torre a legitimate chance to go back to the World Series, or watch him walk.
Trade a hitter if that’s what it takes. Trade a top prospect like you should have done last summer. Trade Manny Ramirez, like, you know, yesterday.
Torre will never say any of this, of course. That’s why he is so perfect for this job in this town. He never stirs it up. He always keeps it calm.
Can you imagine any other team going through an ownership divorce without constant harping from the dugout? How many coolers would Lou Piniella have thrown by now? How many tweets would Ozzie Guillen have sent by now?
The closest Torre will come to anger is envy. You saw it before Saturday’s game as he sat in the Dodgers dugout and stared out past the bevy of New York writers who once made him king.
“They spend money for a reason,” he said of the Yankees. “They know they need to keep putting a winner on the field.”
And how do the Dodgers compare to those Yankees?
“I don’t think we’re there yet,” he said.
Consecutive division series sweeps, consecutive National League Championship series appearances, and they’re not there yet?
Torre has gone from a team that has the league’s top payroll at $206 million to a team with the 11th-ranked payroll at $95 million. He has gone from a team with three guys pitching like aces to a team with none.
Two autumns ago, Torre seemed close to recapturing that Yankees magic. Last autumn, even closer. But this weekend, somehow, he has never seemed farther away.
Asked for the umpteenth time about a midseason addition early Saturday evening, he sighed.
“We’ve been helped the last couple of years,” he said. “Hopefully, we can do it again.”
Do it or lose him.
twitter.com/billplaschke
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