Offer was designed for Torre to turn down

They made him an offer he couldn’t accept.

They are very slick, these thugs running the New York Yankees, the way they can murder a man and then tell you it was suicide. That is what Yankees president Randy Levine was trying to do Thursday with Joe Torre, make Torre look like the bad guy, the ungrateful guy, the guy who ultimately fell on his own sword when in truth, it was Levine and the Boss Brothers, Hank and Hal, who plunged the knife into Torre’s back.

And there are plenty of people who will fall for the cover story, that it was Torre’s idea to leave the Yankees, not vice versa, although to truly buy into that it helps to either work for the ballclub or be related to George Steinbrenner.

To anyone else, it is obvious what the Yankees have been doing for the past 10 days. They have been trying to figure out a way to whack Torre while making it appear Torre whacked himself. What they came up with was brilliant in its innovation, chilling in its cynicism and ultimately transparent.

The events of the past 10 days prove two things: One, The Boss is no longer the boss, because if he was, Torre would have been dismissed the morning after the Yankees were eliminated from the ALDS by Cleveland. And two, with his sons now running the show and Levine serving as their consigliere, business will be subtler, but no less savage, in the Bronx and Tampa, ad infinitum.

Clearly, this was a set up, designed to make it appear the Yankees were trying to do the right thing. Kind of like they did with Bernie Williams in spring training. You know, give the deeply valued Yankee Legend every opportunity to remain with the club – so long as he’s willing to swallow his pride, check his manhood at the door, stow his self-respect in a closet.

In both cases, the plan worked to perfection. In March, they were rid of Bernie and today, they are rid of Torre.

After all, nobody gets on a plane and flies from New York to Tampa to tell the Boss to stuff it. No, you can bet Joe Torre went down there Thursday in good faith, hoping to make a deal. Once he got there, he found out all that was waiting for him was a slap in the face.

There’s no other way to interpret a one-year contract, a 30 percent pay cut and insulting “incentives.” After 12 years, more than 1,000 wins, four World Championships and 10 division titles, Joe Torre was being asked to audition for his job all over again.

Levine can couch it in corporate babble all he wants with his talk of the need to motivate people through “performance-based contracts,” and how “no one’s to blame” for the Yankees failure. But if any of that is true, why was Torre’s check the only one being trimmed? How are Levine and general manager Brian Cashman, and CCO Lonn Trost and the Boss Brothers’ being motivated? Are they, too, on performance-based contracts? Are any of the players? Is Jeter taking a pay cut for his miserable October? Is A-Rod?

You know the answers to all of those questions. Torre, clearly, is being scapegoated, and the Yankees have the right to do that.

Sure, $5 million is a lot of dough, but it’s not so much the money as the message it sends. What better way to publicly devalue Torre once again than by cutting his salary?

“We appreciate everything he has done,” Levine said of Torre. “But it is now time for the New York Yankees to move forward.”

That was the Yankee way of saying goodbye to Joe Torre, What they really meant to say was “Good riddance.”