Business Insight Zone

1. On the business-management side: Word is that the Yankees will drag out their managerial circus for at least another day or two. This tends to support my argument from the other day that the Yankees are not doing a good job of handling the decision about whether to retain Joe Torre as their field manager.*

A more charitable explanation of the Yankees’ delay would run along the lines that the club’s owner, George Steinbrenner (or his general manager, Brian Cashman), doesn’t want to embarrass Torre, and so is willing to hear arguments for keeping him — despite his near-ultimatum of last weekend.

I’m not willing to be so charitable. It’s more likely that the organization simply hasn’t put itself in a position to make a decision about Torre — up or down — so that it can move on with it. Torre is what he is: a steady (or somnolent) hand at the tiller, certainly a future Hall of Fame manager, but not a tactical genius. He may simply have held on too long in New York to still be effective. (If top basketball coach Pat Riley is right, at some point the players have heard all your schtick so many times that you just don’t fire them up the same way anymore.)

The Yankees — along with the whole baseball world — have known all of this for ages, and could have (should have) made a decision before now. Well in advance of the playoffs, they could have made a provisional decision, e.g. that Torre would go unless the Yankees won the World Series. (It would damage the club’s image to fire the manager right after the Yankees brought home their 27th championship.) But instead of assessing long-term issues — that is, Torre’s performance across months and years — Yankee executives seem to actually think that the outcome of one or two close games (in a short playoff series, against a division-winning Indians team) could possibly tell them something fundamental and potentially different about Torre’s performance. Which is silly.

Consider the contrast to one of the best-run organizations in the world: Warren Buffett can decide, start to finish, whether to buy a large company in four days or less. That’s from the time the opportunity arises until Berkshire completes the purchase. This happens because, day in and day out, year in and year out, Buffett constantly considers data on the value of companies generally and the state of Berkshire’s business in particular.

Given their handling of this situation, the Yankees strike me as organizationally immature. They should have been in a position to fish or cut bait on Torre within 24 hours of the end of the Yankees’ season, regardless of when that came about.

2. On the baseball side: My predictions from last week were, uh, wrong. The Red Sox are still in it — I like their chances — but they’ll face the Indians for the honor of meeting the Rockies-Diamondbacks winner in the World Series. I still like my predictions just fine — on paper, they weren’t irrational — but it’s a good reminder that the old saw is cliched but correct: “That’s why they play the games.”

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* A note for baseball fans: I’m not arguing whether Joe Torre is the right person to manage the Yankees next year. I believe that he probably isn’t, but I’m not quite arrogant enough to think that I’m the right person to make that decision. what I do know is that a better-run club would take of this situation much quicker and with much less fanfare. The Post and the Daily News are going to make it a circus anyway, but why fuel their fire?