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The Los Angeles Dodgers limped disappointingly into the division series this week, but there's still one record Joe Torre can boast about as he enters his 14th consecutive postseason: His pregame media sessions are, by a landslide, the longest and most honest in baseball.
Described by beat writers over the years as "a must-listen," "a delight" and "baseball's version of the sermon on the mount," Mr. Torre's daily meetings with the press have become the stuff of legend. For nearly an hour before every home game, the soft-spoken 69-year-old sits cross-legged like a Zen master in the Dodgers' dugout, sipping green tea or chomping pink gum and gazing out toward the palm trees that surround the stadium as he waxes poetic about everything from players' antics to his own days as a catcher to the time he took his daughter to a Jonas Brothers concert. On a slow day he might tell the one about the Boston fan he once met in an elevator who told him he'd rather see the Red Sox beat the Yankees than see the U.S. capture Saddam Hussein, or he might reminisce about how relievers were rumored to sneak out of Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia to a local bar through a secret passageway near the bullpen.
Mr. Torre's candor stands out at a time when most sports teams are stepping up media training programs for rookies, encouraging players to dodge tough questions with bland, opaque clichés and even hiring professional spin doctors like former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer to steer them through P.R. crises. Mr. Torre says that though his approach occasionally gets him into trouble with Major League Baseball when he "rattles on" about things he's not supposed to, he strives to be as "honest as I can."
While the baseball world is salivating over the prospect of a World Series matchup between Mr. Torre's Dodgers and his former team, the New York Yankees, the skipper's sessions with the press rarely focus on such grandiose questions. Last week he regaled reporters with stories about his recent conversations with director Spike Lee, insisted that his players deserved to pop champagne even if they lost their last series with the Colorado Rockies, expressed relief that his 13-year-old daughter was now wearing Andre Ethier jerseys to games (she routinely sported Yankees attire to Dodgers Stadium last season) and joked about how Derek Jeter used to flex his muscles around the locker room.
"I like to humanize some of the players that people think are plastic," says Mr. Torre.
Theories on Mr. Torre's loquaciousness abound. Some believe he strategically drags out the sessions to take the heat off his players and get reporters out of the locker room, while others believe he genuinely enjoys the chit-chat. Sportscaster Charley Steiner, who worked with Mr. Torre in New York until 2004 and dined with him at 1 a.m. last Saturday night at a Beverly Hills Italian restaurant after the Dodgers finally clinched the division title, says he thinks Mr. Torre likes the mental exercise.
"It's like intellectual batting practice," says Mr. Steiner.
When the questions peter out, Mr. Torre will frequently let up to 20 seconds elapse while reporters look down at their notebooks, fiddle with their tape recorders and turn toward the field to avoid eye contact. (Mr. Steiner says these awkward silences ensue because "everyone's kind of afraid to set off Mount St. Joseph.") Eventually, if no one pipes up, Mr. Torre will often break the ice himself and continue answering one of the previous questions.
"I alternate between thinking, 'This is great,' and 'Oh, my god, I have transcription to do and a story to write," says Michael Becker, a beat reporter for the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif.
Mr. Torre says he has no ulterior motives, but feels that since he has to talk to the media anyway he "might as well have fun with it."
When he got his first job managing in 1977 after 18 seasons as one of the league's best players, he says he wasn't sure how open to be with the press. "I thought I had to be more restrained or act like a different person somehow," he recalls.
But after eight years managing the New York Mets and the Atlanta Braves, Mr. Torre spent the next five seasons in Anaheim as a TV analyst for the Angels and gained new respect for the work reporters do. He started to consider his media sessions more of "an important responsibility" when he took over as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals in 1990, and says the sessions got longer during his 12-year tenure in New York, where the sheer number of reporters, the intense tabloid scrutiny and the drama surrounding the unpredictable whims of owner George Steinbrenner kept the conversation going for at least 45 minutes each day.
"I must have gotten used to it," says Mr. Torre, who still sticks around the dugout for the same amount of time, even though he says the Los Angeles media haven't been nearly as tough on him.
Most baseball managers, by contrast, keep their pre-game media sessions as short as possible—usually five to 10 minutes—and don't necessarily appear to enjoy the experience. Red Sox manager Terry Francona famously loathes being interrupted by cellphones. Beat reporters in St. Louis say Cardinals manager Tony La Russa doesn't answer questions so much as challenge them.
"Someone asks him why, La Russa asks why not, and round it goes," Sports Illustrated columnist Joe Posnanski wrote earlier this year. "Sometimes the exchanges are testy, more often they are sarcastic and good-natured. But they are never easy."
After Mr. Torre left New York, signing a $13 million, three-year contract with the Dodgers last season, the Yankees' new manager, Joe Girardi, moved pre-game media sessions out of the dugout and into the more formal interview room and cut their length in half. By August, many columnists were routinely skipping the sessions, assuming Mr. Girardi would "say nothing of value," a White Plains, N.Y.-based newspaper reported. (A Yankees spokesman says columnists skip his sessions in order to interview players in the locker room—something they used to be able to do from Mr. Torre's dugout sessions while the players were on the field.)
So chatty is Mr. Torre, on the other hand, that he makes news whenever he clams up. When questioned in 2004 about the report that Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield and Barry Bonds had received steroids from a Bay Area laboratory, Mr. Torre responded: "Next question." (Mr. Torre later said league officials had told him not to talk about the incident, but added that he didn't want to talk about it, either.)
And earlier this year, after negotiations over Manny Ramirez's contract broke down between Dodgers owner Frank McCourt and Mr. Ramirez's agent, a local columnist reported that "perpetually genial manager Joe Torre is now refusing—albeit it in his usual, perpetually genial way—to answer any questions relating to Ramirez."
But those occasions are few and far between. After a 40-minute session on a warm afternoon last month before the Dodgers played the San Francisco Giants (topics ranged from horse racing to who might win the weekend's college football games) Mr. Torre scanned the fidgety crowd for final questions and then asked, "Alright?" Most of the reporters nodded and began to disperse, but one stayed beside Mr. Torre on the bench. "Joe, you said something interesting yesterday…" he began.
Replied Mr. Torre, smiling: "Every once in a while."
Courtesy of wsj 10/09/2009
