Bill Plaschke compares the Dodgers hiring of Torre to “installing leather seats in a jalopy.” First off, when is the last time you heard someone use the word “jalopy”? Second, I’m not sure Plaschke has a clear grasp of what, exactly, Torre brings to the table jalopy bench:

He will do wonders for the career of Russell Martin, catcher taking care of catcher, the way Torre took care of Jorge Posada.

Martin’s career is doing just fine without Torre’s help. To suggest that Torre “will do wonders” for Martin is to suggest that the latter will turn into Mike Piazza or Johnny Bench. Look, I have to watch Martin play on the opposing team several times a year — he’s a fantastic young player who scares the heck out of me — but he’s not Bench or Piazza, and no amount of cajoling (or “taking care,” if you prefer Plaschke’s phrase) will change that.

He could make a star out of James Loney, much the way his calm nature helped make a star out of Derek Jeter.

Lessee, Torre’s calm nature versus Jeter’s talent. I’m thinking Jeter’s talent may have played a role, but I could be wrong.

He will be great for the confused bullpen, every man given a single role, every single night, Beimel to Broxton to Saito in the manner of Stanton to Nelson to Rivera.

As someone who has watched his team’s manager slavishly follow the same formula over and over again, I can tell you it ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Situations should dictate action, but in an era when the “save” stat is glorified beyond reason (and makes for a nice chip at the bargaining table), I can almost understand this fixation on creating defined roles for every last man in the bullpen.

Almost.

Plaschke’s misunderstanding of the Dodgers’ situation aside, I still think that Torre is a bad fit for this club. He has a roster of talented young ballplayers who need to make the transition to big-league contributors. You don’t bring Torre in to develop young players, you bring him in to win championships.

The Dodgers finished fourth in the NL West in ‘07. Their GM, Ned Colletti, worked under Brian Sabean in San Francisco for many years and picked up the latter’s tendency to overpay for veteran players of questionable value.

When you have a stable full of young talent, that’s not necessarily the best strategy. The Dodgers are sitting on a gold mine, and they don’t know it. Now that Torre is in Los Angeles, there’s increased pressure to produce right away, which means that some of the kids will get squeezed out in favor of more proven commodities.

I guess my real point — and I’m getting to this in a very roundabout way — is that the Dodgers’ key strength from a player personnel standpoint is an abundance of young talent. Their front office, on the other hand, is more veteran oriented. So, now, is their field manager.

If the Dodgers were just a piece or two away from championship caliber, then I’d understand the hiring of Torre. Given where they actually are, though, it seems more like window dressing, an attempt to attract attention so that — well, just because.

As a Padres fan, I’m fascinated to see how much damage Colletti and company are willing to do to their farm system in the name of providing Torre with bit players to help complete what they think the puzzle is. The Dodgers have gotten the baseball world’s attention with this hiring. What remains to be seen is how quickly they tire of that attention.

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Girardi probably deserves better. As he was in Florida, he’s being set up to fail. With the Marlins, his problem was that he couldn’t drive that franchise into the ground and force the team to move elsewhere. Now he gets to succeed one of the most successful managers in big-league history while one of baseball’s most notorious owners hands the reins over to his sons, who appear eager to leave their mark on the club they’re inheriting.

And you can be sure, they will leave a mark.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Grady Little has resigned as manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Presumably this opens the door for Torre, while Little gets to make good on his plan to “play with my grandkids.”

Despite Torre’s track record in New York, I’m not sure he’s the right guy for the Dodgers. My gripe isn’t so much with Torre as it is with the fact that I don’t think the Dodgers are quite where they believe they are in terms of being competitive in the NL West.

As we saw down the stretch in ‘07, this division has become very tough. Frankly, if the Dodgers are going to be a serious player next season, they’ll need to make some aggressive moves over the winter. Actually, they were plenty aggressive last winter; this time they need to be smart as well.

Torre has demonstrated the ability to work well with big-league egos, with guys who are accustomed to fighting for (and winning) championships. How will he respond to a team that isn’t assured a spot in the postseason? How will that team respond to him?

And can his grandkids play with Little’s grandkids, or would that be awkward?

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That said, long-time Yankees manager Joe Torre has stepped down. He was presented with a pay cut and refused.

I’m just looking over Torre’s record, and it’s stunning how good he’s been. With the resources at his disposal, you’d expect no less, but 10 AL East titles and 2 wild card appearances in 12 years is impressive. New York captured four World Series titles under Torre.

The Yankees won 90 or more games in all but one season (87 in 2000, when they won it all). They notched 100 or more victories four times.

This gets the guy a pay cut? Tough crowd, tough crowd.

It’ll be interesting to see what George Steinbrenner and company do next. My suspicion is that they will come to regret their decision. Don’t get me wrong, the Yankees will continue to compete because, like their rivals in Boston, they can afford nothing less.

But Torre brought the club in Bronx to levels of dominance it hadn’t seen since the Casey Stengel/Ralph Houk/Yogi Berra era (1949-1964). Torre represents a significant thread in the fabric of the Yankees’ storied history, and he will be more difficult to replace than I suspect Steinbrenner wants to believe.

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To the current records…

Red Sox: 36-15
Tigers (WC): 30-21
Yankees: 21-29

Boston leads the American League East, while Detroit is the front-runner in the wild card race. (I know, it’s crazy to talk about the wild card in May, but bear with me.)

If the Red Sox play .500 ball (eh, .495 ball) the rest of the way, they’ll win 91 games. The Yankees would need to win 71 of their final 112 games (.634 winning percentage) to overtake Boston. I’m not sure which scenario is less likely, but I certainly don’t see both of them happening. The Yankees won’t win the division.

How about the wild card? This is at least possible. Again, assuming Detroit goes 55-56 from here on out, the Tigers will finish with 85 wins. The Yankees would need to play “just” .580 ball (65 wins) to make that happen. And they’d need cooperation from the teams ahead of them in the wild-card race, which is everyone except Tampa Bay, Kansas City, and Texas.

Even with the addition of Clemens, the Yankees pitching staff is a train wreck. I don’t care how good a team’s offense is, a rotation of Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Mike Mussina, Chien-Ming Wang, and Triple-A pitcher du jour just isn’t enough to dig them out of this deep a hole.

If I’m wrong, and the Yankees do make the playoffs, Joe Torre gets my vote for Manager of the Year. Because right now, there is nothing about this team that suggests more than 85 wins is possible.

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