Silva: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for NFC teams.
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Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said team executives gave Steinbrenner their opinions on Torre. Steinbrenner informed them of his decision just before telling the manager his job was safe.
“I believe that he is the right man for this job right now at this point in time,” Cashman said.
Some of Torre’s players lent their support.
“Always in my mind, Joe is manager of the New York Yankees,” Hideki Matsui said.
Derek Jeter’s agent, Casey Close, said the Yankees captain was “thrilled by the news.”
“Everybody knows the comfort level Derek has with Joe,” Close said.
Piniella also backed Torre.
“I’m sorry he had to go through that rigmarole,” he said. “There was no need for that.”
Torre, hired after the 1995 season, nearly quit after last season, when his relationship with Steinbrenner deteriorated. But the two got along well this year and there was no evidence of interference by the owner.
Torre has one year remaining on his contract and is owed $7 million, the highest salary for a baseball manager. He isn’t sure whether he wants to manage beyond 2007.
“When you work here, you have to understand that every year may be your last year,” Torre said.
Late in the season and during the playoffs, he made several controversial decisions. He moved right fielder Gary Sheffield to first base when he returned from wrist surgery, and put Hideki Matsui back in left in place of Melky Cabrera when Matsui came back from a broken wrist.
His most debated move was to drop Alex Rodriguez, baseball’s highest-paid player at $252 million and a two-time AL MVP, to the No. 8 spot in the batting order for the season-ending 8-3 loss to Detroit.
Rodriguez went 0-for-3, dropping to 1-for-14 in the series, but Torre said A-Rod “is one of the important pieces to this puzzle here” and Cashman said the Yankees didn’t intend to trade him.
“I hate to think that if I had just batted Alex fourth that last game, we’d have won,” Torre said.
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Torre talked about how narrow the difference is between winning and losing, citing when Jeffrey Maier reached over the wall and grabbed the ball, giving Jeter a home run in the 1996 AL championship series.
With 1,973 regular-season wins, Torre is 10th on the career list and third among active managers behind Tony La Russa of the St. Louis Cardinals (2,297) and Bobby Cox (2,171) of the Atlanta Braves.
Torre has the longest uninterrupted term for a Yankees manager since Casey Stengel held the job for 12 years from 1949-60. The Yankees have gone 1,079-699 under Torre, and he trails only Joe McCarthy (1,460) and Stengel (1,149) for victories among Yankees managers.
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Across town, as he prepared for the NL championship series, Mets manager Willie Randolph was pleased that his former boss was staying on.
“I didn’t understand all the talk,” Randolph said. “He deserves to be back. He’s done tremendous things for the organization.”
Detroit manager Jim Leyland thought Torre deserved to stay.
“Joe Torre should be managing the Yankees,” he said, “and not a lot of guys can do that.”
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Wesseling: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for AFC teams.
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Silva: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for NFC teams.
