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A little bit of a shocker out of Gotham recently. After weeks of speculation the New York Yankees offered an incentive based contract to their beleaguered manager Joe Torre. And somewhat surprisingly, he turned them down.

This was the first action on Torre's future since Yankee owner George Steinbrenner told The Record of Hackensack, N.J., on Oct. 6 that he didn't think he'd bring back Torre if the Yankees failed to advance to the AL Championship Series. Cleveland then eliminated New York in four games, the Yankees' third straight first-round exit.

Now I am not altogether amazed that they offered him a new deal. But it is somewhat of a shocker that Torre turned them down. Yes, "The Boss" is notoriously difficult to get along with. But Yankee stalwarts like Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera, both of whom enter free agency at season's end, openly campaigned for his return, even intimating that they may not return to wear the pinstripes if Torre was canned.

And the outpouring from fans has been even more impressive. Online petitions sprung up over night, callers bombarded New York sports talk shows pleading for the Yankees to bring the man back and a rally supporting him was held in time square. Yet, in the end it wasn't enough to keep Joe in pinstripes.

It appears that enough was enough for the 67 year old veteran manager. Whether he was insulted by the "play for pay" aspect of the contract or he had just had enough of Steinbrenner we may never know. What we do know is that we are now at the end of an era.

But I'm not sad. Simply put, Joe Torre was somewhat overrated as a manager. He was without a doubt the best I ever saw at dealing with the pressure cooker that is Zoo York. He seemed to have an uncanny ability to handle an incredible menagerie of personalities. But he didn't do all that good a job of managing within the game itself. That's not to say that he didn't know what he was doing, he just came up a little bit short.

The thing that bothers me most in all of this is that while everyone wants to give Torre all the credit for the teams successes between 1996 and 2003, no one wants to place any of the blame for their failures covering the last four seasons on the man's shoulders...all of which began in the most notorious collapse in the history of sports. You can't have it both ways.

To this guy, who is A. a diehard Yankee fan (I still have vivid memories of crying my 9 year old eyes out as I watched Willie Randolph take a called strike three at the knees from the

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