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It's a new day here in New York. Chad Pennington of the Jets has been benched. Alex Rodriguez has opted out of his contract. Don Mattingly has been passed over and will take his 17 years of World Series-less baseball experience with him. And Joe Torre has said "thanks but no thanks" to becoming the highest paid lame duck coach in the history of sports.

It's fitting that his passing ends an era, since his hiring began an era. It was an era of extremely high expectations that were answered by extremely high results. Let's face it, Yankee management had always measured success by World Series titles, and at the time of Torre's appointment, it had been almost 20 years since success had taken place. Torre took over a team that was on the verge of returning to dominance, and brought the key ingredients that brought them over the top - patience, experience, trust, communication and tactical knowhow. I'm sure that managing for years in the National League made the job easier - his experience working in a more pitcher-intensive league gave him an edge over most American League managers. In five years, he racked up four titles, and gave management a reason to trust him, even in down years.

Was Torre simply lucky to inherit a team mostly built by Gene Michael and Buck Showalter? Well, of course, but no more lucky than getting to manage a team with NY Yankee type resources. Would any competent manager have been able to lead the team to World Series dominance? Any answer to that would be pure speculation. Is that important? It is if you're trying to determine whether or not letting Joe go was a mistake. And, when you consider the amount of revenue that's at stake between making a World Series appearance or not, it's a severely important question.

Managing any type of team is a fundamentally difficult challenge. Many think that the hardest part of the job is when to take out the starting pitcher. In truth, that's about 4% of the guy's responsibility. It's communicating the roles of each person. It's instructing personnel in a sport that they've been playing all their lives. It's withstanding media scrutiny, taking the blame for things that go wrong and sharing credit when things go right. And, it's maintaining extreme pressure for 8 months in a row. Joe Torre, a born and bred New Yorker understood pressure and also understood how to exceed expectations. It's no accident he lasted as long as he could.

But, just as Buck Showalter had done excellent work and brought the Yankees

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