Joe Torre
Joe Torre
Joseph Paul "Joe" Torreis an American professional baseball executive, serving in the capacity of Major League Baseball'schief baseball officer since 2011. A former player, manager and television color commentator, Torre ranks fifth all-time in MLB history with 2,326 wins as a manager. With 2,342 hits during his playing career, Torre is the only major leaguer to achieve both 2,000 hits and 2,000 wins as a manager. From 1996 to 2007, he was the manager of the New York Yankees, whom...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAthlete
Date of Birth18 July 1940
CountryUnited States of America
When you start talking about right-handed hitters for the Yankees who hit 40 home runs, there are only two of them. That's hard to believe, and the other guy is named DiMaggio. You know he's special.
We've beat up our umpires. They're now allowed to be human.
With negotiations, you never know what's going to happen.
We're in a pennant race, but the mentality is more of a postseason situation where every game is important enough to win right now, ... We can't be thinking long term.
One thing I'll say here. I'm not going to waste my time talking about negative things. We won a ballgame 9-8. I'm not here to start beating on people, especially the people that, if we expect to win, are going to get us there.
At some point soon, I'll sit down with Bernie and we'll go over everything. I have a great relationship with him, and always have. I've probably talked to him more than any other player here in my tenure. If the first game of the season were today, I'd say he'd be the starting DH. But I also want to give him a lot of time in the corners (left and right field), with the emphasis more on him playing right than left, spelling Sheffield.
I talked to him again today, and he's on board with that. This time of year, you like to go with as much experience as possible.
I've talked to him all year about thinking small, and big things will happen. When you're fighting for a pennant, everybody here will remember that at-bat (on Saturday) rather than a two-run home run when you're up by six runs. I don't think he would have done that last year because he would have been trying to do something bigger.
I talked to him this morning. Just after they stretched, I just went over and he was fine.
I've talked to Bernie and I think he's comfortable with it. Emotionally, he is fine with it. It is just that the last day of July was the day it had to be done. It was in his contract.
I didn't want guarantees, ... I just wanted to clear the air on everything that was part of my unhappiness, anger, frustration - I guess you can put all of those things under one heading. We talked about how we're going to go on from here.
How come certain guys come to New York and have trouble handling this, that and the other thing? Well, these guys came with no expectations, let's admit it. There wasn't anybody holding their breath to see what they were going to do and they had a chance, I think, to pitch as opposed to try and talk about it.
I can't talk about something I don't know anything about. We feel we really don't want to comment on these things.
Every time the Yankees go to spring training, you have to be thinking World Series. I don't think that's a disrespect to any other team. It's just understanding the pressure that goes with playing here.