After sixth straight early exit, Yanks need to move on

Joe Torre has to go. Someone I know and trust in baseball said Torre deserves to go out on his own terms, and that's about the only reasonable argument I heard yesterday for keeping him another year. But that just isn't enough. Torre has known the score for 11 years, known it ever since he took the job managing the Yankees. As it is, he's already gotten to stay through five straight failures, a privilege that never would have been accorded anyone else.

The standards are different around George Steinbrenner's Yankees -- and they still are Steinbrenner's Yankees -- than everywhere else. They tell you often that anything less than a World Series championship is considered a failure. Taking them at their word, how can they keep Torre?

His Yankees have now failed six straight times. So by their own standards, the highest-paid manager has done no better in six years with $1 billion worth of talent than you or I would have done.

Worse still, the most miserable failure was the most recent one, where Torre's $200 million team didn't show up in Detroit. Torre's team lacked energy, it lacked any sort of swagger and, ultimately, it lacked hits and runs and was blown out of Motown. The Yankees looked like they expected to lose to talented young Jeremy Bonderman, and I can't blame them if they did. If they can't dent Kenny Rogers, how were they supposed to touch Bonderman?

The Yankees have hit nothing lately but a 13-year low (even the two years before Torre were better than this). A great majority of their high-priced players under contract for 2007; how can they all possibly show in spring training and pretend they'll respond to Torre's message this time? The answer is that it can't be done.

The New York Daily News reported in Sunday's editions that Steinbrenner is "set to fire Torre'' and replace him with Lou Piniella, and it's clear that Torre is indeed on the chopping block, as he should be. There has never been any other alternative to Torre than Piniella, a Steinbrenner favorite who brings the necessary credibility, the opposite personality of Torre and a prime hope to rescue Alex Rodriguez, a longtime protégé of Piniella's.

Torre has already survived some extremely bad falls. He survived the team's historic meltdown against the archrival Red Sox in 2004 for its fourth straight failure, and then last year survived a second first-round upset at the hands of the Angels in five years.

There is no evidence Torre will survive this time. Some folks within the organization say they can see Brian Cashman, Torre's longtime ally, fighting to save him. But even if Cashman, who himself has surely noticed Torre's strategic failings this season, puts up a fight, it's a losing fight now and can't be based on anything beyond abject loyalty, nostalgia and a sense of debt.

Torre became a Hall of Fame manager here with a stunning four titles in five years. But he was always better with personalities than strategy. This year he failed on both accounts. Club officials have noticed how Torre failed to get the best out of Rodriguez, and Torre's frustration showed on his lineup cards in the playoffs, insulting the superstar player Cashman acquired by batting him sixth, then even moving him to eighth. By Game 4, when Rodriguez was in the No. 8 hole, it seemed like more of a message than a strategy. In any case, it was a desperate act.