Actually, Joe, It Was About The Money

Maybe it was symbolic, but still Torre was in fact unhappy about getting a thirty percent pay cut because he saw it as implying he'd done a bad job. I think if Torre had been offered a two year deal at $5 mil per, with an option for a third year at $8 mil, that he might have been offended as well at the implication he hadn't succeeded by getting to the team to the post-season three years in a row. And he would clearly find that $5 mil more offensive if it included a chance to make an extra $3 mil a year by getting to the World Series. Hey. I think incentives are absurd. Jeter gets $18 mil or whatever a year; does he really need an extra $500,000 for winning a Gold Glove or the batting title or ALCS MVP? As an owner, I would as policy object to ALL incentives. The players make a TON of money. Their incentive for all those goals should be the joy of the game and the NEXT contract. Millions of dollars and pride is incentive enough. But Torre didn't object to incentives in his last contract. Maybe because they were ONLY hundreds of thousands, they seemed like minor additions and not "real" incentives like the $1 mil per playoff level in his new one. But would Torre have accepted a pay cut? Doesn't sound like it. It sounds like he would argue -- reasonably -- that getting the team to the playoffs was success, not failure and that his track record speaks for itself. So yeah, it was about the money. And incentives are only insulting when they're really big.