Go Mets!

What would life be like without sports?

Sports is that one place where Pittsburgh Steeler fans can rail against Barry Bonds for alleged steroid use, where the hypocrisy is as thick as the book of allegations covering their beloved football team.

Sport is a place where, although "we" couldn't do "it" ourselves, we expect "them" to do "it" every time, perfectly.

Sports is also that one place where I can root for someones demise and not feel too bad about it all.

And so we have the Mets vs. Yankees.

Muck the fets, but sweep the Yankees! You see, I'm no Joe Torre fan, and the sooner he is discarded, the sooner the Yanks can potentially return to greatness, and the sooner I can root for them, again.

Joe Torre is probably a nice guy, every writer says so. He's probably a great manager to play under, every player says so. But Joe Torre is not a great manager if you want victories.

It's true, it's very true.

He had one winning season as manager before he was hired by the Yankees, and had never won 90 games in a season. That's not great, and that covers about a decade of work, give or take a season. You know how these guys are hired and fired.

He took a St. Louis Cardinal team in the late 80's, a team that had much post season success and expectations, and created a cellar dweller.

As to his World Series victories, as if $100++ million payrolls aren't sufficient in themselves to provide a victory, local writers and insiders have lauded the "character" element of those teams. Joe Torre was given platitudes for keeping out of the way and 'knowing what to say to a player' in treating him like a professional.

Great. What has the problem been lately then? This team no longer has the "character" players? You'd think payrolls the size of theirs could overcome such shortcomings.

A-Rod, Jeter, Posada, Williams, Abrieu, Johnson, Giami, Rivera.

What's wrong is that Joe Torre's only accredited skill at managing isn't working, if it ever had.

I wouldn't entertain thoughts of encouraging the firing of anyone outside of sports. The reality is that coaching for Joe Torre is not a necessary vocation for him anymore, he's got his million. So I have no fear of bad karma coming back to bite me, I want Joe to go.

One of the ironies of my life is that the man who could not steer the ship to success for my NL team went on to skipper 3 title runs for my AL team. The only hitch had been I swore off the Yankees the day they hired him, and even if I'm the only man in America who wants to see Joe go, I still contend I could of won more titles than he did with that obnoxious payroll.