Joe Torre

Joe Torre was a most valuable player who could not win as a manager, until the New York Yankees hired him at 55 and he won four World Series in five years. A back page called him Clueless Joe the day he got the job, a journeyman with a losing record and no postseason series to his name. He answered with the greatest run of his life, a calm hand on the most pressurized job in sports, and rode it to Cooperstown. The Hall of Fame elected him in 2014.

An MVP Who Never Reached the Series

Torre grew up in Brooklyn, the youngest of five children of an abusive police detective, and became a star in his own right, a catcher and third baseman who made nine All-Star teams. In 1971 he won the National League MVP and the batting title with the St. Louis Cardinals, hitting .363 with 230 hits and 137 runs batted in. He collected 2,342 hits over 18 years with the Braves, Cardinals, and Mets, and through all of it he never once played in a World Series. The October stage that would define his second life stayed closed to him in his first.

The Journeyman Who Could Not Win

Torre managed the Mets, the Braves, and the Cardinals across 14 seasons and finished under .500, a record of 894 wins against 1,003 losses, with a single playoff trip and not one postseason series won. So when George Steinbrenner hired him to manage the Yankees in 1996, New York reacted with scorn. The Daily News ran the back page "Clueless Joe," and a columnist sneered that the search must have taken one phone call. Nobody expected what came next.

The Yankees Dynasty

Torre won the World Series in his first season, beating the Braves after losing the first two games, and then won three more, in 1998, 1999, and 2000, four titles in five years. The Yankees reached the postseason all 12 years he managed them, won six pennants, and ran off 114 wins in 1998. He handled stars and role players the same way, and he handled Steinbrenner with a calm that defused the most volatile owner in the game. "My greatest talent is calmness and being positive," Torre said. "I concentrate on what you can do even in the worst of times." Mariano Rivera and the rest of the Yankees played loose because their manager never lost faith in them.

The Steadiness

Torre managed on temperament more than strategy. "Pressure is part of the game," he said, "but you shouldn't have tension." His players felt the difference. "You'll lose confidence in yourself long before Joe loses confidence in you," the pitcher Mike Stanton said. He carried the same calm through his own hardest year, returning to the dugout in 1999 about two months after surgery for prostate cancer, met by a standing ovation at Fenway Park, of all places.

A Brother on the Operating Table

The 1996 title came wrapped in family. Torre's older brother Frank, a former major leaguer who had played in two World Series that Joe never reached, was dying for want of a new heart, and he got a transplant on the eve of Game 6, the game in which Joe's Yankees clinched. "Both my parents had died years before they could have seen me celebrate," Torre wrote, and a life-saving transplant for Frank came the night before the end. The brother who never became a Hall of Fame manager was the one who had a ring as a player, and now, at last, so did Joe.

Beyond the Bronx

Torre managed the Los Angeles Dodgers from 2008 through 2010, reaching the Championship Series twice, then moved into the commissioner's office as a top executive. He and his wife built the Safe At Home Foundation, named for the safety he had felt at school as a boy hiding from his father's violence, and he spoke about that abuse openly to help children living through their own. "I used to feel like the abuse was my fault," he said. The man who steadied a dynasty had needed steadying once himself.

Cooperstown and Number 6

The Hall of Fame elected Torre in 2014, in the class with Bobby Cox and Tony La Russa and three first-ballot players, and he went in as a Yankee. He finished with 2,326 managerial wins and four championships, the only man in history with 2,000 hits as a player and 2,000 wins as a manager. The Yankees retired his number 6 that August and hung his plaque in Monument Park alongside Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio, the men who had owned the October stage he reached so late and then refused to leave.