Murray Chass and the Torre story

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the new book coming out next The Yankee Years, a memoir/auto-biography by the former manager and Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated. Kudos to the marketing people at Doubleday (didn’t they used to own the Mets? Hmm. Maybe that has something to do with it) for keeping the book in the discussion for the past several days.

Our friend Murray Chass makes Torre’s story a subject of an uncomplimentary column on his website. The animus stemmed from a incident many years ago in which Torre made some harsh comments about Chass first:

Had he stopped there, I would have taken his remark as a personal attack, but it wouldn’t have been the first time I heard such things from managers. But he didn’t stop there.

and and his colleagues in general (thankfully, the reported remarks weren’t anti-Semitic in nature or that would have been another kettle of fish):

His comment was no longer aimed at me alone. It was an indictment of the entire baseball press corps. It was an indictment of every writer who covered the Yankees and covered Torre and may have covered Torre through his then 15-year career.

Here was a manager who for all of those years had feigned a certain attitude toward writers that had now been exposed as phony. A person can’t have any regard for people whom he sees as knowing nothing about the job he and they are doing.

It was a stunning revelation. Torre had no visible reason to be upset that night, a reason that would have prompted his outburst. It wasn’t as if the tough loss imperiled the Yankees’ position in the division race. They had a four-game lead with only 10 games to play. The loss did not threaten to affect the outcome of the race or the team’s season.

Torre, however, never acknowledged his unusual response, never said he was having a bad night or had a bad headache. His statement stood, and from that moment forward, I looked at him differently, watched and listened to the way he spoke with reporters in group interview sessions before or after games and could only think he was wearing a mask that served as a barrier that shielded the real Torre from the couple of dozen or more reporters and columnists who surrounded him in the dugout or crammed into his office to hear.

I do not know Chass, although I’ve done a couple of stories on him, and I certainly don’t know Torre at all, but the former NY Times sportswriter comes across — to me at least — as making his comments very personal, which is absolutely his prerogative. But 12+ years is a long time to carry a grudge over some words said in the heat of a pennant race.

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