Joe’s job is on the line. In his 12 years managing the NY Yankees, the team has made post-season appearances 12 times, including six World Series appearances and four World Series wins. Still, with the exceptional talent paid for by a payroll that is 36% higher than the next highest paid team (Red Sox), and 275% higher than a team like the Arizona Diamondbacks, expectations for winning are high.

When the Yankees make the postseason, but three years in a row fail to advance beyond the first round, who gets the blame?

Reports are that Yankees owner, George Steinbrenner, is keen to fix the blame on Joe Torre.

With Joe Torre at the end of his contract as manager, Steinbrenner faces a turning point in his ownership. The decision on retaining Torre is his, and his opinion is clear: he wants Torre gone, just as he did last year, as punishment for another first-round playoff loss.

The uncertainty surrounding Joe Torre’s continuing status as manager of the Yankees, which could be resolved as early as tomorrow, brings to mind some seminal ideas presented back in 1964 by William Gamson and Norman Scotch, sociologists at Michigan and Harvard. They proposed three possible explanations for the relationship between managerial succession and organizational effectiveness. These explanations apply to organizations in general, and baseball teams in particular.

Explanation 1: The manager actually matters. The idea here is that Joe Torre’s decision making and management style are responsible for both the Yankee’s successes and their failures. We need to consider here whether another top manager would have accomplished more or less than Torre did, and whether a replacement manager can raise the Yankee’s performance, perhaps by avoiding mistakes that Torre made.

Explanation 2: The manager matters, but managerial change is very disruptive. The idea here is that Joe Torre may have direct influence on the Yankee’s successes and failures, but that replacing him should not be done without consideration of the undesirable consequences. Torre is part and parcel of the Yankee's informal network of interpersonal relationships, organizational culture, and organizational routines. We need to consider here whether the benefits of new leadership would be outweighed by organizational disruption, including the loss of key players closely tied to Torre, such as Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, and Andy Pettitte, and including the effects that Torre’s loss would have on team captain and future Hall of Famer, Derek Jeter’s performance.

…Joe Torre has always been his Zen center amid The Boss’s chaos theory. But what is Jeter’s world without its core? What if Torre, the only major league manager Jeter has truly ever known, is fired after 12 seasons?

Explanation 3: The actual effect of the manager is unknown, or unimportant. His real value in this situation is as a scapegoat. The idea here is that the policies and decisions by the front office are far more determinative of the team’s success than are Torre’s on-field decisions. Is it Torre’s fault that his pitching staff was so weak and unreliable? This isn’t to say that a great manager makes no difference in the long-term success of a team. However, as Gamson and Scotch say (p.70), “…variance in skill between those who become field managers is so small that managerial skill may be considered a constant.”

Why is ritual scapegoating useful in baseball and in business in general? If managerial responsibility for success and failure is largely a myth, it is perpetuated because those involved have a stake in maintaining it. As Gamson and Scotch point out, if a manager like Torre denies responsibility for the Yankee’s failure, then he cannot credibly take responsibility when the team is successful. Furthermore, Yankee fans may be appeased by the ritual sacrifice of Torre, leading them to believe that substantive changes have been made that can rekindle their hope for future success. Finally, scapegoating Torre takes the focus off both bad decision making in the front office and poor on-field performance by the players.

Consider that Alex Rodriguez was arguably the best player in baseball during the regular season. He hit 54 home runs, had a batting average of .314, and knocked in 156 RBI. But, in the American League Division Series, in which the Yankees were eliminated by Cleveland in 4 games, Rodriguez hit one home run, had a batting average of .267, and had 1 RBI.

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