A recent column about Derek Jeter’s retirement announcement turned out to be more about Gene Michael than Jeter. The column gave Michael credit for changing the culture of the New York Yankees’ organization in the early 1990s when he was general manager and George Steinbrenner was suspended.

However, I have learned that Michael deserves even more credit than I have given him. I credited Michael with changing Steinbrenner’s thinking – and don’t think that was ever easy – about trading good young players for high-priced veterans instead of keeping the good young players and letting them develop into good major leaguers.

In that same column I mentioned Joe Torre’s hiring as the Yankees’ manager for the 1996 season, writing that Torre wasn’t Michael’s idea but that “Arthur Richman, a senior member of the media relations department, recommended Torre, with whom Richman had worked with the Mets.”

That story had prevailed for 18 years. For 18 years Richman had been given credit for the hiring of the man who managed the Yankees to four World Series championships in a five-year span. The only problem was it was a fairy tale.

Richman, who suffused himself in the acclaim he received for his contribution to the newest Yankee dynasty, never denied it, never set the record straight. No one did. Steinbrenner, who could have, didn’t. He was happy to have Richman get the credit rather than the man who should have.

“George already thought Michael got too much credit for things,” said a man familiar with Yankees’ developments in those years. “George was jealous of things he was getting credit for.”

Steinbrenner was thus willing to let Richman take credit for Torre to the point where even Torre supposedly believed he had Richman to thank for the job of his life.

“Even Joe thanks Arthur for telling George,” Michael said by phone from Tampa, Fla., Sunday. “I don’t know that Torre knew it.”

My attempts to reach Torre by phone and e-mail Monday were unsuccessful. But in response to my request to talk to Torre, John Blundell of the commissioner’s office said that Torre, executive vice president for baseball operations, had been tied up all day in spring training meetings in Arizona but told him that “it was both Arthur & Gene who endorsed him to George.”

Michael didn’t see it quite that way, and he’s the only one around to talk about it, and he did after years of silence on the matter. He wouldn’t acknowledge that he had become “increasingly annoyed,” as I was told, “that Arthur took credit – and was given credit by everyone, including George and Torre – for the hiring.”

But he said, “Arthur gave him the phone number because he had it; I didn’t have it. But I gave him his name.”

Richman, on the other hand, was said to have given Steinbrenner a list of several names, including Torre but also Tony La Russa and John McNamara. In other words, Torre wasn’t Richman’s sole suggestion.

This was the way it developed, according to Michael, now the Yankees’ 75-year-old senior vice president and special adviser. After the 1995 season, he and Steinbrenner agreed that he would step down as general manager. He was making more money than the owner wanted to pay him.

“I was making 450, I was going to 650,” Michael said.

Steinbrenner, though, wanted Michael to find his replacement.

“There were nine people I asked if they wanted the general manager’s job,” Michael recalled. “Eight of them said no. George didn’t believe me. Joe came in for an interview for the job. I told him the job was going to pay 350. I don’t think he wanted to be a g.m. at that time.”

Bob Watson became the new general manager but quickly learned that Michael never really left, at least not in Steinbrenner’s mind.

“When the manager’s job became available,” Michael said, referring to the owner’s dismissal of Buck Showalter, “George asked me who are we going to get to be manager. He wanted me but I turned it down. I told him we don’t get along; we fight too much.

“I had some knockout fights with him, swearing and yelling at him. Fugazy – Bill Fugazy, a Steinbrenner confidante – said once ‘I thought I was going to have to pull him off you.’”

Torre, Michael said he told Steinbrenner, “was the only one out there who has experience. I said he has experience and we need that. And he’s not going to panic. George could make a young guy panic.”

So Torre it was, except in one of the more bizarre moves of his 38-year baseball career, Steinbrenner tried to lure Showalter back to be the manager – after he had hired Torre. Showalter, however, had made a handshake agreement to manage the Arizona Diamondbacks and didn’t want to back out of that deal.

Lest anyone think that story is a fable – it is, after all, difficult to believe that an owner would do that – Michael said, “I was there. I know.”

While I’m giving Michael more credit, I should add one other matter. In today’s overabundance of statistics, the new-age guys make a big deal out of on-base percentage as if they invented it. They’re too young to know that Michael was an on-base enthusiast.

“Oh yes,” Michael said and recalled how the Yankees acquired Jim Spencer and then Watson to play first base in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s because of their on-base proficiency. “Everybody we acquired at that time had high on-base. When I came back as g.m. in ‘90, we had gotten away from high on-base. But we started doing it again.”

And they began keeping their young players, players like Jeter, Jorge Posada, Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera. Steinbrenner barely dared to trade any of them.

“A couple names came up, but not strongly,” Michael recalled. “George talked to Watson about Fermin but he never would have gotten to that. George had mentioned it.”

That would have been a Jeter-for-Felix Fermin trade. It didn’t happen. It never would have happened. It’s darn fortunate for the Yankees that it never happened.