If David Wells and Joe Torre spoke at all at the unveiling of George Steinbrenner’s monument on Monday, they did no hatchet burying. In a Yahoo Sports podcast, Wells says that he was told he was being skipped over for a playoff start in the 1997 ALDS, and that he heard the news not from his manager, but from pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre. Time for some name-calling!
“That’s pretty degrading when you have your manager tell your pitching coach to tell you, ‘Hey, you’re going to sit out,’ rather than telling you himself. That’s what Joe Torre is to me, a coward.
“I don’t like him at all. As a manager, I think he’s terrible. He wasn’t a fair manager. He didn’t treat people the same. He definitely didn’t treat me the same. […] If he tells you anything else, he’s a liar.”
Torre is not a popular guy this week, it seems. Not that the feeling isn’t mutual in this case. In The Yankee Years, Torre wrote that “The difference between Kevin Brown and David Wells is that both make your life miserable, but David Wells meant to.” (You’ve got to admit, that’s not a bad line.) By the way, you’ll be hearing from Wells a lot over the next few weeks: The entire American League playoffs this year are on TBS, where Wells works as an analyst.
David Wells calls Joe Torre a ‘coward’ on our podcast [Big League Stew/Yahoo via NYP]