Joe Torre has a face like...well, like the gift his sister gave him when she went into the convent in 1951. "She gave me a baseball glove, a Rawlings," the New York Yankees manager recalled a few days before he was to lead his team into its 34th World Series but his first. "She told me to say an Our Father every time I put the glove on, figuring if she gave me rosary beads, I'd never say it."
Torre's face is leathery, to be sure, but there's more to the resemblance between mitt and mug than that. Like a good glove, it is well broken in, comforting, familiar. It's also a chronicle of games and seasons past, with wrinkles and creases to represent plays worth remembering. Joe Torre has a face a baseball fan can love.
One of the nice things about finally having him in the World Series, after 4,280 games as a very good player and an exceedingly decent manager, is that he brings a sense of both family and history to the Series. When shortstop Derek Jeter threw to first for the final out in the Yankees' A.L.C.S.-clinching victory over the Orioles in Baltimore on Oct. 13, he set off a love-in the likes of which is rarely seen in baseball. Torre openly wept as he embraced his equally teary coaches and players. Later, Torre expressed his love, over and over, for his real family: his wife Alice and their 11-month-old, his older sisters Rae and Sister Marguerite and, on a phone line back to New York City, his brother Frank at Columbia-Presbyterian hospital awaiting a heart transplant.
The year his sister took her vows was the year Joe, an 11-year-old New York Giants fan growing up in hostile Brooklyn, rushed out onto Avenue T to celebrate Bobby Thomson's home run off the Dodgers' Ralph Branca. That was also the year his brother Frank signed with the Boston Braves. Six years later, Frank was in the World Series with the Braves. Because their mother and father had separated, Frank, nine years older than Joe, became a surrogate father, paying Joe's way through St. Francis Prep and giving him his 1958 World Series ring. The ring, unfortunately, was stolen from a New York hotel room in 1971, the year Joe hit .363 for the St. Louis Cardinals.
Similarly, Torre had Series appearances taken from him--as a player with the contending Cardinals in '73 and '74 and as a manager with the Braves in '82, when they lost to the Cards in the N.L.C.S. Think of the irony. Torre grew up in New York when there was a Series every year, yet he played 18 seasons and managed 13 without being in one. "It was like watching somebody else eat a hot-fudge sundae," he says.
He may not have liked the Yankees growing up, but Torre was mindful and respectful of the pinstripe tradition, which is one reason he took baseball's most dangerous job. Maybe the '96 Yankees and Torre were a good match because he is, as owner George Steinbrenner likes to point out, a New Yorker--the first native New Yorker ever to manage the Yankees. More likely, though, these Yanks have responded to Torre's toughlove. Late in the season, Torre detected a subtle change in the way his best player, Bernie Williams, was playing center. "I told him I wasn't seeing the life I'd seen him have, and he understood."