Why Joe Torre, Not Casey Stengel, Is the Best Manager in Yankees History
May 23, 2011 · Jesse Golomb SoapBoxSportsByte · Jump to comments
Article Source: Bleacher Report - New York Yankees
(Who is the best second baseman in Yankees history? It’s probably not who you’d expect. Click here to find out. On the other hand, the franchise player is probably EXACTLY who you think it is. Click here for that piece.)
This is the culmination of my MASSIVE Yankees all-time team, which took me around two dozen hours to complete between research and the writing. It’s also the last piece that I will post on SBSB, with the whole 6,000-word epic hitting BaseballDigest.com tomorrow. I will link you to the entire piece when it is launched.
But for now…
Manager: Joe Torre
“What, what, WHAT?! Torre over Casey Stengel? Joe Torre over the same guy who took the Yankees to 10 pennants and seven titles in just 12 years? That Joe Torre?!” I think there’s a pretty good chance that was a rough paraphrasing of your thoughts when you saw Torre’s name in this article instead of the manager whom most consider the greatest in the history of the game.
Perhaps I’m crazy, and perhaps I’m biased as a result of my fresh memories of Torre’s tenure and my obvious lack of firsthand experience with the Stengel regime. But I think I would be remiss if I didn’t recount in gruesome detail why Torre’s achievements with the Yankees were more impressive than Stengel’s.
Torre certainly had his shortcomings as a manager, most notably his reliance on veterans and his propensity to ride any reliable middle reliever until he was so far underground there was no discernible chance of reemergence (see: Proctor, Scott; Gordon, Tom; Quantrill, Paul), but I’m sure that Stengel would have gotten his fair share of criticism had he played in this era of sabermetrics, super “slo-mo” and microanalysis.
At first glance, Torre’s .602 Yankees winning percentage and his six pennants and four World titles don’t appear comparable to Stengel’s .623 mark and his 7-3 World Series record. But Torre’s victories were compiled in a much different era, and while that may not seem important to some, era analysis is a crucial component of the evaluation of any baseball player, manager or executive.
Stengel managed in an era in which there were only eight teams in each league. All teams played an equal 22 games against each other every year.
Torre’s time in New York began after the inception of interleague play. At the beginning of his tenure (before unbalanced schedules) with the Yankees, teams played 12 games against each team in their respective division, 11 games against other teams in the same league and three or four games against four interleague teams.
For the sake of argument, let’s nullify the marginal difference of games against divisional and league teams. In Torre’s 114-win regular season of 1998, the Yankees’ average American league opponent (against whom they played 146 games of their season) had a combined winning percentage of .485. In Stengel’s winningest regular season (a ’54 campaign in which the team won 103 times but finished second), opponents had a combined .475 winning percentage.
This may not seem like a huge difference, but it does have a significant impact over a six-month regular season.
The bigger change in circumstance with the two skippers, however, is the rise of parity in the majors over the last few decades. In 1954, Stengel’s Yankees played 110 of their regular season games against teams that had a combined 308-462 record. This means that the Yankees played more than 70 percent of their games against five teams that won less than 70 games each and had a combined winning percent of just .400. By comparison, Torre’s 1998 Yanks played just 39 games total against sub-70-win opponents.
If that’s not enough, there’s the institution of the entire playoff system, which was completely nonexistent in Stengel’s day. When Casey managed in New York, he simply was required to finish ahead of the other seven teams in his league (with as many as five of them being complete non-factors) and the Bombers were catapulted to the World Series.
Torre first had to finish ahead of everyone else in the usually ultra-competitive AL East and then was required to win at least seven of 12 games against two of the best teams in the league. Then he was able to stake his claim at the top of the World Series, but not before his team knocked off the National League champs despite carrying the burden of playing over 170 games in a seven-month span on their collective backs.
One last thing to keep in mind: The biggest knock on Torre’s success with the Yankees was that, as his detractors so eloquently put it, “Anyone can win with a nine-digit payroll and a roster full of superstars.” There may be a smidgen of truth to this (at the very least, talent certainly makes a manager’s job easier), but it’s quite easy to make the same damaging claim towards Stengel’s achievements. After all, this is the same man who managed the likes of Yoga Berra, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Whitey Ford and many other all-time greats.
It may make sense, then, to look at Torre and Stengel’s respective managerial records with other teams. Like Torre, Stengel had little success with two different teams (the Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Braves), compiling a 581-742 record and a .435 winning percentage before becoming a Yankee.
Over 14 seasons with the Mets, Braves and Cardinals prior to taking over in New York in ’96, Torre was 894-1,003, good for a much better .471 winning percentage (and posted in a much more difficult era, no less). After leaving the Yankees, Stengel had just a .302 winning percentage with the admittedly unsalvageable expansion Mets, while Torre won more than 53 percent of games with the Dodgers.
Take those records as you wish, as far too many variables are involved to put them directly against each other; nevertheless, they certainly are eye-catching.
There’s no doubt that both managers had exceedingly impressive tenures with the Yankees; it’s simply a matter of the eras in which each coached. Stengel may have had a higher winning percentage and more World Series appearances and titles than Torre, but he did so in an undoubtedly much easier era for long-run success.
Some may choose to adhere to their long-gestating biases and ignore all of the aforementioned facts. But it appears that those same facts paint an exceedingly clear picture of one exceptional manager’s dominance over another.
Jesse Golomb is the creator and writer of Soap Box Sports Byte. He currently works for Baseball Digest. If you enjoyed this article or want takes on the rest of the major leagues, the NFL and more, you can read the rest of his work on soapboxsportsbyte or follow @SoapBxSprtsByte.
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