Some of the Yankees who found themselves on the receiving end of Joe Torre's seething scowl called it "The Stare" -- his face tight, his mouth frozen into a horizontal line, his dark eyes seemingly blackened by a slight inward tilt of his eyebrows. The Stare was reserved for capital offenses, for missing signs, for awful decisions.
Reporters sometimes got The Stare as well, most often when they asked questions Torre deemed to be driven by a quest for sensationalism, and the manager would chastise them bluntly, the way a fourth-grade teacher speaks to a wayward pupil. When I covered the team for The New York Times, he expressed particular distaste for ESPN, especially after Roger Clemens' beaning of Mike Piazza and the subsequent bat-throwing incident, because he felt the network replayed the ugliness over and over only to sell its programming.
In an honest moment today, Torre would aim The Scowl again -- into a mirror. Because this time, Torre is guilty of fostering and feeding on sensationalism, at the expense of former colleagues.
It is Tom Verducci who wrote the actual words of the book, and over the past two days, Verducci has worked to underscore this point and to note that the fragments about Alex Rodriguez, Brian Cashman and the Steinbrenners are just tiny pieces of a book of almost 500 pages. The voice is third person, not Torre's, as it was the first time Torre and Verducci collaborated. A lot of the words are based on Verducci's reporting.
But here's the problem with that: It's Joe Torre's book. His name is on it. He got paid for it. He had a chance to read every word, every sentence, every paragraph. He had to approve every passage.
He had the choice, for example, whether to include this, from page 245:
Back in 2004, at first Rodriguez did his best to try and fit into the Yankee culture -- his cloying, B Grade actor best. He slathered on the polish. People in the clubhouse, including teammates and support personnel were calling him "A-Fraud" behind his back.
And it was Torre's choice, ultimately, to include this, from page 252:
In his own way, Rodriguez was fascinated with [Derek] Jeter, as if trying to figure out what it was about Jeter that could have bought him so much goodwill. The inside joke in the clubhouse was that Rodriguez' pre-occupation with Jeter recalled the 1992 film, "Single White Female," in which a woman becomes obsessed with her roommate to the point of dressing like her.
And it was Torre who approved the words in the excerpt released Monday -- after Torre had assured Cashman on the phone Sunday that they were friends and always would be friends.
Only much later did Torre start to put the picture together of what had happened to his working relationship with Cashman. The personal falling-out they had in 2006 spring training over philosophical issues, Cashman's decision not to bring back longtime center fielder Bernie Williams when his contract expired in 2006, his submission of odd lineup suggestions based on stats, his lack of regard for Ron Guidry as a pitching coach, his detachment from the "they" who were making an offer to Torre, his failure to offer any comment or support in the meeting that decided Torre's future, his failure to personally relay Torre's proposal to find a way to reach an agreement to the Steinbrenners … "I thought Cash was an ally, I really did," Torre says.
Those passages were based on Verducci's reporting. They were written by Verducci.
But it's Torre's book. And within the pages of this book with Torre's name on it, some former colleagues are demeaned, and that was his choice.
Verducci said in a radio interview on WFAN on Monday that all this is not really new, that everybody has known for years that Rodriguez has had difficulty assimilating with the Yankees' veterans.
Here's what's new about it: The stories are in a book authored by Joe Torre.
This is hardly a new concept. The fact that former first lady Nancy Reagan could be difficult was hardly a new concept, but when Ronald Reagan's former chief of staff, Don Regan, published a book detailing that, well, it became a very big deal. The suggestion that the run-up to the Iraq war included misinformation was something posed by many reporters -- but it became something very different when posited in a book by former White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
The book is in Torre's name. Says right there on the cover. By Joe Torre and Tom Verducci.
In the four seasons Torre managed Rodriguez, he would never have come out in the dugout for his daily session with reporters and revealed that teammates called Rodriguez "A-Fraud," and if any reporter had asked him whether it was true that teammates compared A-Rod to the character in the movie "Single White Female," they would have gotten The Stare.
But he has gone beyond his own code of conduct with his book. In spring 2003, David Wells and a ghostwriter published a book, "Perfect I'm Not: Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches and Baseball," and Torre was furious, angry that Wells had aired some of the Yankees' dirty laundry in the pages. Wells tried to distance himself from some of the words in the book, saying they belonged to the writer, but the Yankees' manager would not accept that. After a meeting with the pitcher, Torre said this to reporters:
"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."
Torre, Cashman and George Steinbrenner held Wells accountable -- in the end, he was fined $100,000 by the organization.
Now it is Torre's responsibility to be fully accountable for the words in the book that has his name on it, and he must stand behind those words.
If he hides behind Verducci and the suggestion that the ugly anecdotes aren't his, the explanation will have echoes of "I didn't knowingly take steroids." If he embraces the words as his own, he also should acknowledge he has been, at the very least, extraordinarily hypocritical.
