How the New York Yankees Can Win a World Series Without Joe Torre

Joe Torre, the manager of four World Series winning teams, has reportedly turned down a five million dollar contract plus playoff incentive money to manage the New York Yankees in 2008. As far as I'm concerned, being a fan of this World Series playing team since 1977, the New York Yankees are better off without Joe Torre and some of the players on that team. The New York Yankees need to do more than just find a viable replacement for Joe Torre to win another World Series.

For the last seven seasons, the Bronx Bombers have increased their payrolls to bring World Series Championships to the fans, but have failed miserably in this quest. It's not all the fault of Joe Torre, though over the years I've questioned many of his calls and his apparent lack of aggressiveness and craftiness that he used to show more of from 1996-2000. George Steinbrenner has been more than patient over this, allowing seven underperforming years to transpire, and yet, he and the organization still offered him a fat contract with incentives for doing good in the playoffs next year (reportedly 5 million for 2008 plus a million dollars for each playoff round the New York Yankees advance to, according to the New York Post online article by George King and Cassie Carothers October 18, 2007).

The New York Yankees management has forgotten that it takes role players who have character and good pitching to advance far into the playoffs and win another World Series with or without Joe Torre. They've gone out and spent over a billion dollars since 2000 in salaries for basically nothing. Players like Alex Rodriguez, Johnny Damon, and Jason Giambi have consistently not done the job when it counted, yet they make millions of dollars to either be underperformers or get injured a lot like multi-million dollar pitching bust Carl Pavano, who pitched a whopping 2 regular season games this year for ten million dollars. I wonder if Pavano had to give any of that money back?