LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — The guy wearing the Hall of Fame shirt, looking out with a gaze somewhere between bemused and stunned, was the biggest loser 18 years ago.
Joe Torre, Cooperstown Class of 2014, sat next to Bobby Cox and Tony La Russa, all unanimous choices of the 16-member Expansion Era Committee
His route from out of uniform for what he believed was for good in October 1995 to a plaque should be a reminder to us all about the value of never giving up. Joe Torre’s life changed at 55, took him on this road:
Loser. Winner. Champion. Immortal.
“It was my secret that he was a winner,” remembered his wife, Ali Torre, of how she felt on Nov. 2, 1995, the day her husband was named the 31st manager in Yankees history. “Now, everyone knows.”
Indeed. Clueless Joe to Cooperstown Joe. It is why he now says, “George Steinbrenner changed my life.” Why his plaque will have him in a Yankees hat.
“I had a good [playing] career,” Torre said. “But let’s admit it, I am not here if what happened with the Yankees didn’t happen.”
That it happened is one of those strange twists of baseball history, a surprising move that changed the arc of a man’s life.
Remember this: Joe Torre used to hate to watch the World Series. Because inevitably a graphic would come on showing those who played the most games without ever reaching a Fall Classic. And there he was on the short list, a distinguished 2,209-game career but not one played in the postseason, a reality his brother, Frank, said put a hole in Joe’s belly and soul.
But it really was worse. The Braves were the NL’s preeminent team of the late 1950s. Torre joined them in 1960 and that domination stopped. The Cardinals were the NL’s dominant team of the 1960s. Torre joined them in 1969 and that stopped. He went to the Mets not long after Ya Gotta Believe and rejected a trade to a World Series-bound Yankees team in the mid-1970s because he thought he could become the Mets manager.
As a manager, his Mets clubs were awful, only to be transformed not long after he left under general manager Frank Cashen. His Braves won the NL West his first season, 1982, and were swept out of the NLCS. The Cardinals had been the NL’s dominant team of the 1980s — Torre took over in 1990 and they never won.
When he was fired in 1995, he had managed the only three teams for which he had played. He had one playoff appearance, zero wins, fewer opportunities.
It is forgotten to time, but the Yankees actually first talked to him about their open GM job that winter. He didn’t want to invest the time, especially with Ali pregnant. The organization circled back to him as much out of desperation as anything. He was well liked by titular GM Bob Watson and a Yankees media relations man with Steinbrenner’s ear named Arthur Richman. The idea that greatness would flourish seemed impossible at the time. The Yankees were in post-Buck Showalter chaos, Don Mattingly had retired, Steinbrenner was in a daily frenzy.
Frank Torre actually warned his brother not to take the job because of the frequency of Steinbrenner firings. But this was his last best chance.
“I was really going to find out if I could do this,” Torre said. Meaning, sure, the pressure was there, but so was the talent.
We live in an age when statistics have become more advanced and intangibles get thrown to the side. But more and more studies are done about how the positive or negative energy of a workplace influences productivity — something we cannot yet quantify well with numbers. And Torre — despite what whizzed around him — was an expert at defusing tension. He hated loud noise, a ramification of having an abusive father.
So he strove for serenity, for inoculating his clubhouse from Steinbrenner and the pressures of New York and the October quest. He did this expertly for 12 years. It has something to do with four championships, six pennants, 12 playoff teams. Something to do with the road from loser to winner to champion to immortal.
“I was reading Bill Parcells’ biography on a StairMaster [at the Yankee minor league complex] before that first spring training and deciding what I needed to do to change to get better results,” Torre recalled. “And one of the chapters’ headlines was something like: ‘If you believe in what you are doing, don’t change.’ So I didn’t.”
He stayed the same. Ali Torre was right. There was a winner inside the loser. The world got to know it. Got to know more, actually. There was a champion inside of Joe Torre.
An immortal.