The baseball playoffs are back in all their televised tedium (they might actually be superior on the radio), and while there is evident fresh blood in the postseason pool with the Rays and the Brewers, there are plenty of old faces to fill the ever-widening high-def vistas of family rooms across America.

There's ball one, and there's a cutaway to Joe Torre, reacting to nothing.

There's a foul back, and there's a cutaway to Terry Francona, reacting to almost nothing.

There's an aborted third-to-first pickoff attempt, and there's a cutaway to Mike Scioscia, looking as if he could do without the racket those inflatable thunder sticks are making.

There's an intentional walk, and there's a cutaway to Ozzie Guillen, who is likely pondering something intemperate to say but appears to be just staring balefully at nothing much of anything.

There's Lou Piniella managing in the postseason again, or am I watching my tapes of the 1990 League Championship Series? No, there's no Barry Bonds stranding a couple with two outs in the seventh, complaining about the sun. And that's good.

The point is, I suspect, that the same men who managed seven of the past 10 World Series champions are back for more of their close-ups, and that five of the eight postseason managers already have at least one World Series ring. It doesn't mean there isn't opportunity for contrast. Torre, for example, has won 2,227 games, where Brewers manager Dave Sveum has won -- wait, let me count 'em -- 7.

Joe Maddon is going to be the American League Manager of the Year, not that I have any inside information. It's just that anyone who can manage Tampa Bay to the postseason should be manager of the year at the minimum, meaning in addition to governor, pope, ambassador to Sweden and probably head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the National League, matters aren't as clear, but the notion exists that no one may have done a better job than Torre during this, his first summer in exile from the ever-nastifying Steinbrenner politburo.

"There are certainly things you have to deal with in New York that can make it difficult," Torre said in a conversation in the visiting dugout at PNC Park when his Dodgers were here two weeks ago. "But on the other hand, we'd been so successful there that players just followed the system and indoctrinated the new players to it."

The system he inherited in Los Angeles was fractious at best, and Torre didn't minimize the personal challenge it represented for him, at age 68, even with his four World Series titles, 12 consecutive postseason appearances, and his universally recognized gravitas.

All right, maybe not universally.

"In the spring it was clear that was going to have to be some reconstruction going on," Torre said. "There's a certain trust factor you have to earn. And we had a lot of young players who were not ready to buy into the idea that they had to change anything. You just have to be patient with that, so you keep your energy up. I needed [transplanted Yankees coaches] Larry Bowa and Don Mattingly. I needed all the rest of my staff."

That was just to start, of course. Over the course of the next six months, what he'd need most was enough pitching to overcome the fact that his offense was going to hit 43 fewer doubles, 16 fewer homers and score 35 fewer runs than the 2008 Pirates.

You can look it up.

You can add Manny Ramirez and Casey Blake to a lineup that limped around without Rafael Furcal for most of the summer -- and general manager Ned Colletti did -- but you can't tell me you can get such a baseball team into the postseason without a massive contribution from the manager.

"It was trying at times, frustrating at times, not knowing how we were going to do it," Torre said, "but it was gratifying to see the growth in people, and we always kind of kept it going in the right direction.

"That's the best part of it for me."

Torre would never say it out loud, much less publicly, but among the most satisfying aspects of this postseason for him has to be that it excludes the Yankees, who low-balled him into walking away after leading them to four championships, then conveniently and unconscionably overlooked his contributions to the organization in final-day ceremonies at doomed Yankee Stadium, then stepped in a big pile of their own steaming envy when Hank Steinbrenner (Hankenstein, as the New York tabs call the son of George) penned an opinion piece in which he essentially said it was unfair that the Dodgers can be in the postseason with fewer wins than the Yankees.

So when you see Torre in a hundred prime time cutaways over these next few days, you might appreciate his contentment, and know that his mere presence in this postseason dugout has effectively yanked the silver spoon out of Hank's mouth and found for it another place.