“You’ve changed,” Torre said he told Cashman.

And you didn’t, Cashman might have shot back.

It sounds like sacrilege to say that Torre’s departure was needed. But it feels that way if you were around the Yankees his last three or four seasons. The team’s four rings in Torre’s first six years inhibited players who came later. A sort of inertia, not just Yankee arrogance, set in. Even superstars like Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson admitted that they tried to just fit in on arrival. They constantly heard they had to “earn their pinstripes.” Jason Giambi, for one, never felt free to fully express his Inner Frat Boy. In the hangover years immediately after the Red Sox Idiots’ team erased a 0-3 deficit against the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS and went on to win the World Series, the Yankees often seemed like the most joyless team in baseball.

The Steinbrenner Manifesto — any year without a World Series championship is a bad year — had become such accepted gospel, a few Yankees admitted they actually cried with relief, not joy, after they clinched a playoff spot in Boston the year after the collapse.

And no, that is not normal.

Slideshow   Celebs in the stands A look at some of the celebrities attending the 2009 MLB playoffs. more photos

Girardi has his faults too. He can over-manage, get too tightly wound. Still, it’s hard to imagine Torre junking tradition and benching Jorge Posada for light-hitting Jose Molina in Burnett’s playoff starts because Burnett performs better with Molina as his personal catcher. But Girardi did that. Other Girardi decisions — refusing to burn out his relievers as Torre chronically did; moving Jeter to the leadoff spot; actively looking for ways to manufacture runs; cultivating A-Rod’s trust — have been shrewd too. A ritual that newcomer Burnett started — ambushing each hero of the Yankees’ 15 regular-season walk-off wins with a whipped-cream pie to the face — has injected a sort of lightness the Yanks haven’t had in a long, long time. Music, once verboten in Torre’s clubhouse, is back.

These Yankees are loose and loaded all right — and not just in their bank accounts. If they don’t win the World Series, it will be a mild surprise. They had the best record in baseball and the feeling they’re throwing off is just different. Which makes you think something else Beane said in Torre’s book about the ’98 club probably applies.

“Let’s face it, when you’re that good it’s a pretty overwhelming environment for another team to go in and try to beat them,” Beane said.

If the Yankees win it all this year, it’s not just the money, stupid. It’ll be a new twist on Moneyball itself.

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