“He certainly has the right to say what he wants to say. But don’t get yourself thinking that you have to respond to it. You do what you want. I don’t tell guys what to do. I just tell them this is part of being here. He’s The Boss. It’s something they should have known before they got here, anyway. Any time he says something, it’s news.” Joe Torre on his Boss (Newsday)

As expected, there a more thoughts on Steinbrenner’s weekend outburst today. Here’s a good one from Murray Chass in the Times:

Steinbrenner’s outburst risked jeopardizing the dual support for Giambi by focusing even greater attention on him, if that’s possible. Giambi has enough pressure on him without Steinbrenner creating more.

“I shouldn’t have said it, but that’s how I feel,” Cashman said Steinbrenner told him. Maybe Steinbrenner has withdrawn so far into the background in the past year or two that he has forgotten the impact his words can have. Or, as always, he doesn’t care what impact his words have.

This time at least, he did not direct the words at one of his players. That left some room for humor. “Matsui said he wished he could speak better English,” Tellem said. “If he did, he could act as a marriage counselor for George and me.”

Speaking of the Boss, my good pal Repoz is what you’d call a classic-Steinbrenner-hater. It’s a label that he wears proudly. Growing up, Repoz fondly recalls the Mike Burke/CBS days, when he and his friends could move down to the good seats at the end of a game and actually shoot the breeze with Burke. Last Friday, Repoz sent me this bit from Burke’s 1984 autobiography:

I finally came across the Michael Burke book “Outrageous Good Fortune” from 1984 and I thought you would dig this little passage about the whole facade todo. During the planning stages of the The Yankee Stadium renovation, Burke was notified by architects, that the new Stadium could not support the facade without girders…so there could be no facade. Michael Burke wanted some of the facade to remain…somewhere.

From the book…Burke to the acrhitects…

“Then take it down and mount it around the perimeter wall behind the bleachers. We’ve got to preserve that characteristic somehow. Come back and
tell me you can do that.” They found a way.

Years later, long after I left the Yankees, I happened across a television interview with George Steinbrenner. The reporter asked him about preserving the facade, applauding the fact that it had been done. In response George
related how it came about. “You see, I was watching a game at the Stadium
one night in 1972, the last year in the old park. My good friend Cary Grant
was my guest. ‘George’, he said, ‘you’ve just got to keep that facade. It’s so characteristic of the Yankees.’ ‘OK, Cary,’ I said; ‘we’ll do it for you’ And we did.”

Oh, well.”

Alex…the book is chock full of anti-Stein material….a must read for those with that lovely trace of hatred still left in our soul.

The Don

Oh, and I liked this little bit buried in a Mets “notes” piece:

Willie Randolph called Joe Torre on Friday morning and got positive feedback from the Yankees’ skipper. “He said you guys have been nice to me,” Randolph said, referring to the media. “He said I’m doing okay. As long as I’m getting approval from the godfather, I’m all right.”