21st
Douchebag of the Week: Joe Torre
Originally published: February 3, 2009
On Friday evening, Larry King had a night he’d “been excited about for weeks.” Indeed, King had the first TV interview with Los Angeles Dogers manager Joe Torre “about his controversial new book, The Yankee Years.
While King failed to make mention of it at any point during the entire interview, Torre did note early that the book was co-written by Tom Verducci. While Verducci’s regular work is mostly writing at Sports Illustrated (predominantly reporting on baseball), his other authored credit on amazon.com is 1997’s Chasing the Dream: My Lifelong Journey to the World Series—also co-written by Joe Torre.
Actually, Torre has his name on a number of baseball-related books.
When King said that there was a report of the Yankees now asking employees to sign an agreement not to write a book, Torre said he never signed anything like that—with the Yankees or with the Dodgers. “So then going back, you have to be shocked by all of this?” said King.
Torre responded:
Well, I’m shocked by the initial reaction. And the only reason I’m not upset by it, Larry, is the fact that I know once people read the book, they’ll — I think it will be more in perspective and they’ll have a better understanding of what it’s about.
Of course Torre isn’t going to be upset by the reaction; he’s about to get a ton of money for a best-seller. But his continuing charade of pretending to be “shocked” by the usual hype and fallout that surrounds the release of such “tell-all” books (especially, in the era of steroids, with baseball) is incredibly shameless for a variety of reasons.
The first of which is the manner in which this book will be received by those former co-employees Torre used to work with. It’s fairly obvious that Torre gets to pass the blame on to everone and just about everything other than himself for his tenure as Yankees skipper coming to an end. There’s also not just the terribly malicious nature to the fact that he knowingly had this book published when both the people he cared most for as well as the ones he still loathes will be affected by it, but the ironic result that the likeliest victims of Torre’s attempt at revenge will be the ones he probably wanted to hurt the least.
And that’s just the Yankees. Their following is rather impressive.
Of course, Joe Torre currently works for the Los Angeles Dodgers. And if you work within that organization, well, how do you interact with Torre now? As a player, do you begin to wonder how your performance, your attitude, your everyday personality will be described in a future book? As an employee in the front office, do you just always wonder now what Joe is really thinking?
Most regrettably, there’s just the simple hypocrisy of it all. Amusingly, it was actually Joe Torre who was singled out by Jim Bouton in his follow-up to perhaps the most famous sports tell-all book ever, Ball Four.
From the paperback edition of I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally:
It is interesting that despite all the noise made by baseball players about the book (Ball Four), there were no nose-to-nose confrontations. … The only player who ever said anything harsh directly to me was Joe Torre of the Cardinals and he was in the stands and I was on the field at the time. … I didn’t catch everything he said. It was something like this: “Hey, those were some nice things you said about (Mickey) Mantle. Watch out. I hear he’s got a contract out on you.”
And while Torre was managing the Yankees in 2003, he was furious that Daivd Wells had his name attached to a book recounting “Boomer” being semi-loaded when he tossed a perfect game. When Wells tried to pass the blame on to his ghostwriter, Torre said:
We talked to him about a lot of things today. I just sensed he was bothered by it. Not by what we said, but by how it came out. How much of it is actually what he said and how much isn’t exactly what he said, I don’t know.
But there’s no question: It has his name on it, and he has to be accountable for it.
Oh, and Torre should certainly be accountable for all three of his well-earned titles now: manager, author, douchebag.
