George Steinbrenner is ticked, and if there’s better news for Major League Baseball, I don’t know what it is.

When Mount St. Steinbrenner erupts, it can mean only one thing: The Yankees stink. And when the Yankees stink, it means that pennant races open up, other teams get to see what first place feels like, and columnists get easy essays to write. It puts the Yankees — and baseball — in the lead of every sports broadcast and on the front of every sports section.

It also starts the Joe Torre watch. No one comes close to the 10 consecutive years as manager Torre has put in under Steinbrenner. Torre won those four World Series in his first six years as manager. In his next years, he got to the Series twice and lost both times. Last year, he lost a 3-0 lead in the ALCS to the hated Red Sox.

Steinbrenner’s latest remarks, issued as a press release after the Yankees lost their third straight to the Orioles and fifth straight overall suggest that the manager should be worried.

“It is unbelievable to me that the highest-paid team in baseball would start the season in such a deep funk,” Steinbrenner said. “They are not playing like true Yankees. They have the talent to win and they are not winning. I expect Joe Torre, his complete coaching staff and the team to turn this around.”

Firing Torre before this year would have brought the wrath of Yankee Nation down on Steinbrenner’s head. Not that he would have cared; Steinbrenner has never worried about who he was offending during his many eruptions in the 33 years he’s owned the team.

But now, Steinbrenner could turn firing the most respected manager he’s ever had — though not the most popular; that distinction belong to the wiry firebrand Billy Martin — into a public relations coup.

Sitting on the bench as Steinbrenner’s batting coach is Don Mattingly, probably the most popular Yankee since Mickey Mantle. And Torre’s bench coach is the enormously popular Joe Girardi, the team’s catcher when the latest championship run began in 1996.

Either Girardi or Mattingly would be enormously popular with Yankee fans as the new manager. Even if you hated to see Torre go, you’d love to see either one of those replace him.

The Boss knows that, just as he knows from the day he brought Donnie Baseball back last year as a coach that most Yankee fans looked forward to the day Mattingly took over when Torre retired.

Except no one retires as Yankees manager. Few people ever retire as manager of any team. The way you leave the job is you get fired.

Despite Steinbrenner’s history of impetuosity and overreacting — we are just 12 games into the season — he may be on to something this time. He’s right when he says the team is disappointing. He’s right when he says Yankee fans expect better.

“Enough is enough,” Steinbrenner said in his statement. “I am bitterly disappointed as I’m sure all Yankee fans are by the lack of performance by our team.”

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