Hall of Famer Joe Torre passionate about going to

Some people don’t need an introduction.

Joe Torre, for one.

You know him. Baseball icon. Hall of Famer. The only big leaguer with 2,000 hits as a participant and 2,000 wins as a supervisor, he steered the New York Yankees to 4 World Series championships — and the Dodgers to consecutive National League West crowns and NLCS appearances in 2008 and 2009.

So you’re well-versed on Torre’s baseball bonafides, but you may not remember of the most significant half of his legacy: He’s spent the past 24 years serving to people who truly would need to be launched to him.

Kids who are too younger to know Torre the participant, supervisor, shade commentator — but who can, sadly, relate with what he went through when he was their age. Kids who, like him, are growing up afraid and anxious because of home violence at home, and who need what Torre didn’t have — someplace protected to go to for help.

Since 2002, Torre and his spouse, Ali, have been behind the increasing the Joe Torre Safe at Home Foundation. Across the nation, they’ve set up protected areas in colleges, specialised school rooms that really feel more like dwelling rooms and that are manned by skilled counselors educated in home violence intervention.

They’re at colleges in New York, Cincinnati, Tahiti and in L.A., at Bellflower Middle/High School and John Adams Middle School, John H. Glenn High and McKinley Elementary School, Palisades Charter High, Santa Monica High, Waite Middle School and Washington Preparatory High.

And they’re open to all, whether or not you’re a child experiencing violence or you need to have the opportunity to help friends who are.

This past 12 months, the muse says it reached more than 28,000 college students. And since it started, more than 425,000 younger people, households, colleges, and communities.

These Safe at Home areas are all named “Margaret’s Place,” in honor of Joe’s mother, who was for years the sufferer of his father’s violent ire.

“It’s a tough subject to talk about,” Joe Torre said. “But you can’t run away from it.”

He did, though. He’s 85 now, but until he was 54, Torre didn’t reveal that baseball had been his refuge when he was growing up. He didn’t inform anybody that when he was a child, if he noticed his dad’s car in entrance of his home, Joe would go to a buddy’s home and wait until he left for his job as a New York police detective. Joe didn’t share recollections like he would later, of seeing his big sister, armed with a knife, standing between their mom and their father, who was going for his pistol.

St. Louis Cardinals third baseman Joe Torre poses swinging a bat prior to a recreation in 1971.

(Dave Pickoff / Associated Press)

He didn’t acknowledge what those traumatic experiences he’d tried to bury did to him, not until he began to speak about them.

“I thought I was born with this shyness and this nervousness,” Torre said before a Dodgers recreation in May, when the membership launched him and Ali and gamers and coaches wore T-shirts during batting observe that read: “Everyone deserves to be safe at home.”

“During my playing career,” Torre continued, “if we lost a game and I didn’t get any hits, I’d beat myself up. I was fortunate, I had a good career, but there was always something missing. I really probably could have enjoyed it a lot more than I did.”

That didn’t change until 1995, when he began speaking about the home violence he skilled. He was shocked, he said, to discover himself sharing his story, opening up for the first time at a “Life Success” seminar in Cincinnati, Ali’s hometown.

“Ali, she says, ‘You want to go to this Life Success symposium with me?’” Joe said. “And she’s eight months pregnant with our daughter and I’m not about to say no to anything she asks me to go. So we go in and they separate you, and they put you in groups of six strangers — and I’d just been named manager of the Yankees, so I’m very self-conscious.

“But after a day or so, you’re in it, you know? And then we went home and I called my sisters and asked them questions. Because they always tried to protect me, so I had to drag it out of them … ‘Did dad hit mom?’

“The biggest thing for me was knowing that my dad bringing fear down on the home was what caused my feelings that I was embarrassed to have. Once I went through that, I was able to go deeper.”

Yankees supervisor Joe Torre bumps fists with catcher Jorge Posada after a win in April 2004.

(Brian Kersey / Associated Press)

Speaking about what was beforehand unspeakable helped him cope with his trauma. He said it made him a more empathetic supervisor and a more assured man. It also made him need to converse out publicly and to encourage others to do the same, to break the cycle of silence.

So they’re getting the phrase out at — where else? — ballparks. There was the stop at Dodger Stadium in May, and before that, in 2025, seven major league groups had activations at video games, as did 63 minor league golf equipment who hosted a “Safe At Home Awareness Game.”

Because often we do need an introduction, to join youngsters with people who can keep them protected, who can guarantee them they’re not the only ones in their place.

“He’s talked about this many times: If he had access to a program like Margaret’s Place, he wouldn’t have felt like he had to carry this burden alone,” said Rose Robles, the muse’s senior director of applications. “That was one thing he’s really stressed, he felt he was the only one that was going through this.

“And he would have had some options, some choices for how to respond to what he was experiencing and how to understand it. One thing that we say is that violence thrives in silence, and that is basically what he was experiencing.”

Forty-four % of the children Margaret’s Place counselors helped in 2024-25 had been dealing with some kind of violence at home. Twenty-seven % have skilled some kind of relationship or courting violence. They also help youngsters who’ve been uncovered to group violence or other traumatic occasions, or who are grieving a traumatic loss.

Dodgers supervisor Joe Torre pauses for a second while answering questions in August 2010.

(Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)

At Bellflower Middle and High School, Principal Jessica Cummings said a Teen Dating Violence Awareness Week and guardian workshops targeted on fostering healthy relationships elevated awareness on her campus.

“We are grateful,” she wrote in an e mail, “for this partnership and the positive impact it has had.”

Of the scholars surveyed after receiving providers, Safe at Home indicated that 99% reported feeling safer and 93% said they used the instruments they realized in counseling.

Torre has absorbed many years of anecdotal suggestions too — the realizing nods he sees in the group when he’s talked to teams of youngsters about this, the cameraman who slipped him $20 to put toward the muse, the interviewer who shared his account of having grown up in a violent family.

“Anyone can become a victim,” Ali Torre said, “Our goal is to intervene and prevent. There are little boys we can have conversations with: ‘You don’t have to repeat the cycle.’ To little girls, ‘There’s an option for you…’

“And Joe has opened a lot of doors for us.”

When you suppose of Joe Torre, it’s as a former Dodgers skipper. A nine-time All-Star and the 1971 National League Most Valuable Player.

You ought to also suppose of him as a champion of youngsters who now know that they aren’t alone, and that they’ve people who will go to bat for them.