Tim McCarver Compares Yankees’ Treatment of Joe Torre to “Despotic” World War II Regimes

“They have airbrushed his legacy,” Tim McCarver said of the New York Yankees’ treatment of Joe Torre on Fox’s broadcast of the Yankees’ game against the Tampa Bay Rays yesterday. Listen to the rest of McCarver’s rant, and you might wonder whether he will the victim of some airbrushing in the near future.

That’s some incendiary rhetoric—if McCarver knew what the Internet was, he might have realized that he essentially extended Godwin’s Law to the real world—and it’s incensed more than one Yankees blogger. A transcription and take via Subway Squawkers:

⇥You remember some of those despotic leaders in World War II, primarily in Russia and Germany, where they used to take those pictures that they had ... taken of former generals who were no longer alive, they had shot ‘em. They would airbrush the pictures, and airbrushed the generals out of the pictures. In a sense, that’s what the Yankees have done with Joe Torre. They have airbrushed his legacy. I mean, there’s no sign of Joe Torre at the stadium. And, that’s ridiculous. I don’t understand it.⇥No, what’s ridiculous is that McCarver would make such ignorant, outrageous comments, that simultaneously prop up Joe Torre as a victim and smear the Yankees front office, and that have no basis in fact. To compare Torre to a victim of Nazis and Soviet Communists is both offensive and absurd. These comments were in such incredibly bad taste, I half-expected McCarver to compare Torre’s “The Yankee Years” to “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “The Gulag Archipelago.“That’s taking it a little further than McCarver did, but there’s no question that McCarver made an absurdly inarticulate comparison between an authentic tragedy and a dispute between a millionaire and his former employer. It remains to be seen what, if any, punishment McCarver will face.↵