Joe Torre and the Team USA roster

Team USA manager Joe Torre, flanked by bench coach
Larry Bowa and pitching coach Greg Maddux.

It has been said that there are two things every American male believes he can do better than anybody else: Drive a car and manage a baseball team.

In that sense, it's easy to find fault with Joe Torre, the manager of Team USA in the World Baseball Classic, who has a roster loaded with stars and an Internet loaded with pointed criticism.

The American squad played its fourth game of the tournament Tuesday night, thumping Puerto Rico 7-1.  As I followed the game, I thought about the difference in how this year's roster was constructed as opposed to 2009 and 2006 — and how less is more in this case.

Torre this year has used one shortstop (Jimmy Rollins), one second baseman (Brandon Phillips), one third baseman (David Wright). He has locked in the top five slots in the batting order: Rollins-Phillips-Ryan Braun-Joe Mauer-Wright. Adam Jones has been the full-time center fielder and Eric Hosmer the first baseman.

In short, Torre has a regular lineup — and an actual, honest-to-goodness bench.

Previous editions haven't. The 2009 roster had Chipper Jones (replaced in the second round by Evan Longoria) and Wright at third, and manager Davy Johnson tried to make playing time for both. It had Rollins and Derek Jeter at short, and those two stars were rotating in and out of the lineup.

The 2006 roster had, in anything, even more star power going on. Jones and Alex Rodriguez; Jeter and Michael Young and Chase Utley up the middle — and every lineup was different.

They had to be different. No matter who the manager is, he had to recruit these stars to be on the team, and he had to keep them happy — and they didn't abandon their day jobs to sit on the bench.

Torre may not have a roster filled with the absolute best talent the United States has to offer, but he has has a roster he can be consistent with. Willie Bloomquist is nobody's idea of a star, but he knows what being a utility man is all about. Team USA would theoretically be better if Mike Trout were on the roster instead of Shane Victorino, but who sits in that case? Braun? Trout? Jones? 

Torre's doing enough shuffling with Giancarlo Stanton and Ben Zobrist and the other two catchers, Jonathan Lucroy and J.P. Arencibia; he doesn't need another superstar to find at-bats for.

I'm sure Victorino, Bloomquist and Arencibia would like more playing time, but I also think they knew going in what their roles would be.

Tracing some managerial trees

Walt Weiss played for four managers, two of them
Tony LaRussa and Bobby Cox. The other two were
connected to LaRussa.

Three sure-fire Hall of Fame managers, and one with a pretty good case, abandoned the dugout the past couple of years, and some of the managerial hirings this offseasons led me to ponder how the careers of Bobby Cox, Tony LaRussa, Lou Piniella and Joe Torre have affected the current crop of managers.

Cox: His managerial progeny includes Ned Yost of the Kansas City Royals and Fredi Gonzalez, who succeeded him with the Atlanta Braves. Walt Weiss, just named to the Rockies job, also played a couple of seasons for Cox, but I'm putting him in LaRussa's group, for reasons I'll detail later.

Torre: Joe Girardi (Yankees) played for and coached under Torre. Don Mattingly (Dodgers) coached for Torre in New York amid speculation that he was being groomed to succeed Torre; when the Steinbrenners replaced Torre with Girardi and Torre went to the Dodgers, Mattingly followed and eventually inherited the job.

Lou Piniella managed for 23 years,
but spawned few managers.

Piniella: This is odd for a guy who managed for 23 years with five different franchises, won a World Series, had a 116-win season: I can't identify any manager, current or past, whose career trajectory was clearly affected by Sweet Lou. Mattingly and Willie Randolph played for him in the early years of his managerial career, but Donnie Baseball belongs in the Torre family and Randolph had so many skippers it's hard to identify a mentor.

In an odd way, Piniella may have been indirectly influential on Ozzie Guillen, who never played for or worked with Piniella; Joey Cora spent the bulk of his career with Piniella, and Guillen leaned as heavily on Cora as any manager has relied on a coach in recent memory.

LaRussa: He's got literally generations of managerial progeny — too many, probably, to accurately recount. Consider this this: Jim Leyland was LaRussa's right-hand man during LaRussa's first job, with the White Sox in the early 1980s; Leyland's been managing pretty much forever himself. Heck, Gene Lamont spent eight seasons with managerial jobs in between coaching stints with Leyland.

Mike Matheny led the Cardinals
back to the NLCS in his first
year as manager.

Besides Leyland, current managers in the LaRussa tree would include:

• Mike Redmond, new Miami manager; he clearly regards Leyland as a crucial figure in his career;
• Weiss broke in under LaRussa in Oakland, then played one season for Rene Lachemann in Florida (Lachemann is to LaRussa what Lamont is to Leyland — a coach who left periodically for managing jobs only to return after losing those jobs). Then Weiss moved on to Colorado, where he played for Don Baylor, who had played for LaRussa himself, although it would be difficult to claim LaRussa as a primary influence on Baylor. (More likely influences on Baylor would be Earl Weaver and Gene Mauch.)
• Mike Matheny, who succeeded LaRussa in St. Louis.
• Robin Ventura of the White Sox played three-plus seasons for Lamont, the longest period for which he had a specific manager. Ventura also played for shorter periods for Torre, Bobby Valentine and others. I'm not sure which of them was most influential on him.

There are 30 big-league managerial jobs; at least eight of them are now held by the managerial descendants of LaRussa, Cox and Torre.

The Catcher Project: Left out

That's the 14 players in the pool. Assorted comments about a few guys who I didn't do the full takeout on:

Rick Ferrell is in the Hall of Fame, for reasons understood only by the people on the Veterans Committee that inducted him. He didn't make the pool because he wasn't that good. He did play until he was 41, but he had just two seasons of 100-plus games caught after age 31.

Ray Schalk is also in the Hall of Fame. His credentials: He was a "Clean Sox" — one of the 1919 Chicago White Sox not involved in throwing the World Series — and he held the career record for games caught for 14 years or so. Slightly better qualified than Ferrell, but still a weak selection. Mainly a dead ball era guy, he was washed up after his age 32 season.

If Schalk and Ferrell belong in the Hall, so do — oh, Bob Boone and Jim Sundberg and Del Crandall and Tony Pena and ... well, these guys too:

Joe Torre (photo above) will be in Cooperstown someday for his managerial exploits with the Yankees and Dodgers. He was, or should have been, a strong borderline candidate as a player, probably hurt by splitting his time between three positions (903 games at catcher, 787 games at first base, 515 at third base).

He won the Gold Glove at catcher in 1964, which seems preposterous (especially in a league with John Roseboro and Johnny Edwards) — he was never really an outstanding defensive player, and his last game caught in the majors came at age 29. He never caught more than 114 games in a season.

Leaving Torre out troubled me a bit because he DID change positions. My sense of it — and this is more than four decades ago — is that he was phased out of catching (1967-1970) because he wasn't that good at it. He was valuable there because he could hit. And then Ted Simmons came along, and suddenly Torre was a full-time third baseman.

This is a different situation that Mauer. Mauer is regarded as a standout defensive catcher. Moving him to third base would be done to preserve his health. Torre was moved to improve the team.

Elston Howard was better than, or at least as good as, some of the guys in the pool. He didn't reach the majors until he was 26 — the Yankees were slow to get in on this integration fad — and then he had to play just about anyplace other than catcher because the Yankees had Berra. He didn't get to catch 100 games in a season until 1961, when he was 32 — about the age much of the pool started to break down — and had a very strong four-year run as a regular, including winning the MVP Award in 1963.

Thurman Munson, like Carlton Fisk and Johnny Bench, was born in 1947. He died, as noted in the Roy Campanella comment, in a plane crash as age 32. While his batting average still looked good, his power had pretty much dried up and he was having the back and knee problems that shorten many catchers' careers. Which figures; he caught 130-plus games a year pretty regularly in his 20s.