Welcome back, Joe

Sporting News, The, May 31, 1999 by Dave Kindred

Of baseball's happy moments, the best so far this season was Joe Torre delivering the Yankees' lineup card at home plate in Fenway Park last week. Nowhere are the Yankees more certainly the cursed enemy. Yet when Torre exchanged lineups, Red Sox fans who had gathered for another evening of primal-scream therapy paused in their antipathy to do a good and wonderful thing. They welcomed Torre back where he belongs.

Applause rose from all around. It was a waterfall's roar of sound. This joyful noise rose in the ballpark where the mighty and petulant Ted Williams would not so much as touch his cap bill in deference to hometowners who loved his work. Joe Torre raised high his cap in thanks and did a small turn to acknowledge fans in all corners of the jewel box that is Fenway.

We knew Torre would be back because he said he would be and his word is good. Still, it was cancer, and when they talk about prostate cancer and surgery and survival rates and you're 58 years old with mortality whispering in your ear, cancer's a scary thing. It makes baseball a little thing.

From spring training, Torre left to have the surgery. He heard the doctors say he'd be fine and then he relaxed for a while, waiting for his strength and energy to return.

Torre came to Yankee Stadium one day during his rehabilitation and he put on the famous pinstriped uniform with its interlocking NY. Even old men get a thrill out of this child's act of dressing up. Stan Musial still says that's what he misses most, just putting on the uniform. So there was Torre one night in the pinstripes. Not to work. Just to show Yankees fans he'd be back soon. He meant to walk from the dugout to the baseline to acknowledge applause. But an odd thing happened. He began to run.

"I couldn't help myself," he says. "It felt so good to be there."

Sometimes we forget why these people do what they do. It felt good for Joe Torre to be there because baseball is a little thing only when it's set alongside death. It's a big thing most times for people like Joe Torre, as big a thing as there is. It's not life, but it's dose. Take baseball away from these people, their lives are different and it's no fun to see your life become something you don't want it to be.

Joe Torre can tell you about growing up in Brooklyn in the '50s when kids wound rubber bands around paper to make a ball and used a sawed-off broomstick to slap that ball against houses (and through windows). "If you hit the ball over a first-floor window," he told biographer Tom Verducci, "it was a double. Over a second-floor window was a triple. Anything on the roof was a home run."

By the time he was 15, he'd fallen hopelessly in love.

With baseball.

He wore out the spinner on his Ethan Allen All-Star Baseball game. He memorized the fronts and backs of the baseball situation boards that came with the dice and player cards of the late, lamented APBA game.

That summer he visited his brother, Frank, who told him, "Tommy says you can work in the clubhouse if you want, shining shoes and hanging up jocks." Then a first baseman for the Braves, Frank enlisted clubhouse man Tommy Ferguson to keep Joe occupied in Milwaukee. When Frank came up with another idea for his kid brother--it involved "a bombshell of a blonde"--young Joe declined the entertainment.

His reasoning: "What could be better than being at a ballpark?"

At 18, already a powerful hitter, Joe signed with the Braves for $22,500, paid off his mother's mortgage and bought a car. "Didn't have a nickel left," he says, and he didn't much care, either, because he'd found the life of his dreams.

All these years later, he still remembers spring training of 1961. He was the Braves catcher. He looked up from behind the plate to see, wearing a rubber shirt under his uniform top, looking "absolutely enormous" ... Mickey Mantle!

"I thought I was going to pass out or something," Torre says. The Brooklyn paperball kid mostly despised the Yankees for winning all the time. But he still understood they were the Yankees. In that game, Torre hit a home run off Whitey Ford. "God, I can still see it in my mind's eye, because as the ball goes over the fence, who's standing there watching it?" he says. "Mickey Mantle. I'm 20 years old and this is happening, It was incredible."

We could give you the numbers on Joe Torre's 18 years as a player and 17 years as a manager. The numbers are good. But the numbers aren't necessary if you understand this: they only begin to explain the passion that made Torre a good player and a better manager.

He's a common-sense guy, quiet in a storm, a pro's pro who comes to the ballpark every day accepting and embracing the idea that baseball, no matter how much you love it, can break your heart. "I've hit .240 and .360," Torre says, "and I've tried just as hard at both ends."

All this spring, we missed Joe Torre. We missed the Brooklyn kid who now looks so good in Yankee pinstripes. We missed him in those corner-of-the-mouth dugout conversations with the buddha of the Bronx, the dear Zim. We agree with the good folks of Boston. Welcome back, Joe.