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Yanks stuck in neutral as Torre wisely moves on

Hard to blame proud manager for rejecting offer set up for him to refuse

CNBC video
  Torre, Yankees part ways
Oct. 18: Joe Torre rejected a one-year offer to return to the Yankees on Thursday. CNBC's Darren Rovell reports.

There’s no reason to expect that personnel decisions will be made differently. And the problem there is that you can’t have committees deciding on which free agents to sign and which players to offer in trades.

That’s how Congress operates, and you can see how well that works.

Decisions have to be made by one person — the decider. That can backfire in a big way, too, as some would say it has in the White House. But it can also succeed. That’s how the championship Yankees of the 1990s were built — with one man, Gene Michael, putting the team together and making all the baseball decisions.

That’s not going to happen in the Bronx, so expect indecision, delayed decisions, bad decisions and ultimately chaos. And the new manager is going to have to deal with the fallout from that.

And here’s something else for the next manager to think about: Levine said the committee came to a unanimous decision on Torre. That’s disingenuous at best. It doesn’t take that long for a half dozen people to agree on something. It may take that long to come up with a way to make a firing look like a rejection. (Technically, Torre wasn’t fired; his contract was up and he simply turned down the new one he was offered.) But it doesn’t take that long to decide whether you want him back or not.

It’s not the Bronx Zoo anymore. It’s the Bronx Committee.

The zoo was more fun.

Mike Celizic writes regularly for msnbc.com and is a freelance writer based in New York.


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