LOS ANGELES — Do not buy into the propaganda, the revisionist history that sometimes passes for updated truth around the Yankees. Do not permit the lingering giddiness of a championship won under Joe Girardi’s stewardship to alter your memory of what happened to the Yankees between 1996 and 2007.
Do not do what many of the men who run the Yankees would like to do: treat Joe Torre the way certain historical figures used to be treated behind the Iron Curtain when those nations’ history books were being written. You know better. If you are a Yankees fan who has been watching games for longer than 15 minutes, then you know what was accomplished on Torre’s watch.
An ugly divorce — one that Torre himself helped turn even more repulsive than it had to be — shouldn’t obscure that, shouldn’t diminish what the Yankees became under Torre.
It was Graig Nettles, one day during spring training, who laughed in between hitting ground balls with his fungo bat in the beating Tampa sun: “I remember when this was the front lines, the home office for crazy. It hardly seems like the same franchise anymore. And I don’t mean that as a bad thing.”
That is the fiercest legacy. There is a notion that Torre was little more than a caretaker when he was the manager of the Yankees, little more than a front man for a team that was built to win on autopilot. But anyone who believes that ought to be forced to forfeit every stitch of championship gear that sits in their dresser drawers.
You have to remember what the Yankees were before Torre showed up in 1996, and that means looking beyond what had happened on the field for the better part of 20 years, which itself was blightful. The Yankees were title-free for 18 years, hadn’t even been to the Series in 15 years, and yes, there is a large segment of Torre’s legacy that will forever be entwined with the performance turnaround that almost immediately took place.
But it wasn’t just the baseball. It’s against civic law to bring up memories of vintage George Steinbrenner now that the man himself is in the autumn of his years and in declining health. But Steinbrenner had ransacked the franchise for years with awful free-agent signings and worse trades. He had turned the manager’s office into a revolving door and the Yankees into such a joke that it became a no-brainer target for Larry David, a huge Yankees fan, to lampoon on “Seinfeld.”
All you have to remember is that Torre only got the job in the first place because Steinbrenner ran off his predecessor, Buck Showalter, who had done much of the heavy lifting in reviving what had become a last-place franchise on Steinbrenner’s watch. That was the way things were then, though. That’s how they were done.
Then Torre was hired, under such derision, such scorn, such sarcasm, and all he did was win four championships his first five years. All he did was go 12-for-12 in postseason appearances and earn himself a seat at the Yankees’ pantheon table alongside Miller Huggins, Joe McCarthy and Casey Stengel. You want to believe any average joe could’ve done that? You have a short memory.
Did Torre cover himself in glory on his way out of New York? He didn’t. He rejected as insulting a salary that 99.8 percent of Yankees fans can only fantasize about. He wrote a book that Napalmed the bridge between himself and the team, deepened the bitterness, and probably postponed for a good long while the adding of No. 6 to the retired numbers in Monument Park.
All of that is fair. All of that goes on his permanent record.
But so does this: At a time when the Yankees hardly were considered the best brand in their own sport anymore, never mind worldwide, Torre made the Yankees relevant again, then essential, and then, at last, ubiquitous. They have moved on. They’ve won another title without him. Time catches up to everyone, even legends, even legacies.
But it would be foolish, when you see Joe Torre in that Dodgers uniform this evening, to think of him any other way but this one: as one of the great Yankees of all time. Nothing should ever erase that undisputable fact.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com