In the three weeks since Joe Torre was granted a reprieve by The Boss, the Yankees have gone 9-8. Not a bad record over 17 games considering the problems they had last months, but not great either, and it stll leaves the Yankees 4 games under .500 for the season to date. And, to make matters worse, they lost the opening game of the Subway Series to the Mets last night.
There have been some highlights over the past week, the most notable being the signing of Roger Clemens, but things still aren’t well in the Bronx:
The Yankees, in the words of one person close to George Steinbrenner, appear “dead.” But Steinbrenner, apparently, is not.
The Boss is kicking and screaming over his team’s poor start although, in his later years, he is confining his kicking and screaming to behind-the-scenes stuff. “He’s not a happy camper,” is the way a Steinbrenner acquaintance put it.
While Steinbrenner has limited his public comments to statements presumably written by others, apparently he shares the opinion of many Yankees observers early this year that the players appear to lack motivation. While this would seem to suggest that manager Joe Torre’s job could be in jeopardy, there’s a very believable theory going around for why Torre will likely be spared.
It goes like this: Steinbrenner dislikes Torre so much that he wants him to suffer the consequences of a lost season, and that he likes heir apparent Don Mattingly so much that he doesn’t want to subject him to skippering a sinking ship. That sounds about right to me.
So it’s Torre’s punishment, not his reward, to manage this 18-21 team for the rest of the season.
Yea, I know it sounds stupid. But it’s also classic Steinbrenner.
