Mike Celizic

The New York Yankees made Joe Torre an offer he could refuse, maybe one they were praying he would refuse, and the man whose tenure has been distinguished by his deep sense of dignity did the only thing he could do.

He turned it down.

You can almost picture the Yankees’ crack baseball committee breaking out the champagne and toasting its own genius before Torre’s backside cleared the front door of the team’s Tampa headquarters. The guy was too popular to fire, so they got him to leave by leaving him dangling in the wind for three days and then offering him a one-year deal at a 36 percent cut in pay.

You can’t blame Torre for saying, "No thanks." You can only congratulate him and respect his refusal to continue to work for people who would treat him so shabbily after 12 years of service during which he won four World Series, 10 division crowns and never missed the playoffs.

Don’t feel sorry for him. He made $20 million for his last three years of hard labor, which required him to sit on a padded bench for three and four hours at a time nearly every day and make all the tough decisions, such as who to play at shortstop and third base. He’s 67 and not ready to retire, and you know there will be other teams willing to employ him.

If you want to feel sorry for anyone, save it for the guy who has to follow Torre. It’s not that the new manager will have to follow a man who will be cast in bronze and hung on the wall both in the new Yankee Stadium’s monument park and also in Cooperstown.

Torre was great at keeping his team calm and focused and never showing panic, but he was never a great game manager. At least some of the team’s failure to win a championship since 2000 or to advance beyond the first round of the playoffs in the past three seasons has to be laid at his door.

He got the credit when he led them to four titles in five years from 1996-2000; he has to take some of the blame for their failures since.

But Torre’s successor, whether it’s Don Mattingly or Joe Girardi or a manager to be named later — do I hear Lou Piniella’s name out there? — is going to have to work for a team that’s now being run by a committee. Last Saturday, George Steinbrenner told Ian O’Connor of The Record of Hackensack, N.J. that if Torre didn’t beat Cleveland in the ALDS, he would be fired. On Monday night, Cleveland eliminated the Bombers. Four days later, the Yankees made Torre the offer he could refuse.

There is no surer sign that Steinbrenner is no longer calling the shots. If he were, Torre would have been packing his bags by Tuesday afternoon; Wednesday morning at the latest. Instead, after three days of meetings, team president Randy Levine — not Steinbrenner, not his sons Hank and Hal who are taking over his role and not general manager Bryan Cashman — announced that Torre had turned down the deal and it was the time for the Yankees to move forward.

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The challenge for whoever succeeds him will be dealing with a team that’s now being run by Machiavellian committee that needed three days to decide that the best way to get rid of the manager was to let him fire himself by offering him a pay cut and then building in a $1 million dollar bonus if he made the playoffs and an additional million-dollar for each round of the playoffs he advanced to.