Thursday, October 25, 2007

A Different View on Joe Torre

Well its been a while since my last post, but I have reason. Hope everyone is watching and enjoying the World Series, I feel it will be a struggle for both teams despite Boston's game 1 rout.

Everyone feels that the offer the Yankees gave Joe Torre was an insult because it decreased his salary. False. In 2007 Joe Torre made $7.5 million last year as the Yankee skipper. Just to give you some perspective as to how ridiculous this contract was, the next highest salary for a manger was Lou Pinella's $3.5 million from the Cubbies, and the average MLB manager's salary was (I excluded Torre's as an outlier) $1.22 million. Wow. So Torre is complaining about a $5 million deal with incentives anyone could pickup, i.e. $1 million for making the playoffs.

So Torre is making eons more than any other manager, yet still is unhappy. His reasoning is that the decrease in salary is a sign of disrespect to him. Well, the Yankees expect to win a World Series (and should with that payroll) and he's on a good 7 year drought, so he obviously isn't doing the best job. So why shouldn't he accept a small pay cut while still being the league's top paid manager?

If a player has a career year, signs a lucrative deal, and does horrible over that contract, then that player will probably take a pay cut when his next contract negotiations begin. So why is this different for Joe Torre. Has he really done that well as the Yankees' manager? Is there no one else capable of "handling the media" as well as Torre supposedly did? I'm saying there is someone else, and the Yankee's made a smart business decision by not throwing out millions of dollars to Joe.

Almost no one shares my point of view on this, and I cannot understand why the Yankees $5 million+ contract was seen as "disrespectful". It does not make any sense to me. Feel free to comment how you think about the situation now.

1 comment:

David said...

pretty biased writing if i say so myself. seems like it was written by a yankee hater.