This is bad news and worse news. But isn’t all Dodgers news bad these days?

The bad news: Joe Torre is quitting as manager of the Dodgers at the end of this season.

The worse news: Don Mattingly, who has no experience running a team full-time and who has inspired little confidence in those briefs periods when he has been deputized to take over for Torre … will be the manager in 2011.

We can hope this doesn’t happen. And here is how it might not:

The McCourt dirvoce case leads to a Jamie victory … and the selling of the team … or a judge forces the McCourts to sell the team.

And then saner people take charge and tell Mattingly, “thanks, but no thanks, we’ll go with someone who has managed a team … anywhere. At any level.”

Joe Torre is no kid; the man is 70. We couldn’t expect he would want to go through the grind of managing a club for 162 games per year … forever. But it is not unreasonable to think he might well have come back for another year or two if the Dodgers weren’t so horribly screwed up.

The Dodgers are 72-75, and no Torre team has been under .500 this late in the season since 1994. Torre manages winners, and this team had to be a downer.

The Dodgers are a bad club not because Torre got stupid, but because the McCourt divorce has paralyzed the franchise. No money, no decisions, no way to improve. The club didn’t have a starting rotation on Opening Day, and the problem has never been fixed. The “kids” got another year older and several of them regressed, and there went the season.

And this comes after six years of Frank and Jamie bleeding the club white.

We can see how 2010 might have sapped Torre’s enthusiasm. He is a good guy, a good manager and great with people.

Replacing him with Mattingly makes for a huge dropoff. Plus, shouldn’t Dodgers fans be a little creeped out that the Dodgers/Frank have decided to turn the team over to a Yankee?

Joe Torre played for and managed lots of clubs. He had a nice long run in the Bronx, but he is not a Yankee, per se. Not after all those years with the Cardinals and Braves and Mets.

Mattingly is a Yankee. He was drafted by the Yankees, came up in their system, spent all 14 of his years as a big-leaguer with the Yankees.  His career ended in 1995, and by 1997 he was back with the Yankees as a “special instructor.” By 2004, he was in the dugout as the Yankees batting coach.

Mattingly came with Torre to the Dodgers in 2008, as a “special assignment coach,” (the first time he took a baseball paycheck from any club not the Yanks) and in 2009 became a full-time coach.

Two years as a coach in Los Angeles does not make Mattingly a Dodger but, more pertinent to today’s announcement, it does not make him a manager. Elevating him to the manager’s job, after six years of hanging around Joe Torre,  is liking turning over surgery to a man who has watched a lot of doctors but never wielded a scalpel.

It’s just a bad idea. Like so many the McCourts have had. It’s almost as if the city or some fan group should go to court to obtain a restraining order to keep the idiot McCourts from making any serious decisions about the club while the future ownership of it is so unclear.

Dodgers fans should shudder at the thought of what the McCourts might do. Ideas worse than Don Mattingly may be in the offing.