McCarver takes the game seriously, especially when it comes to management dealings with players and managers, especially Torre, his roommate when they played for the Cardinals. But using murderous dictators to make a baseball point, a point about a darn game, was the portrait of a man making an unconscious decision in a conscious state of mind.
Major League Baseball had McCarver’s spiel pulled from YouTube. They said it was about some copyright thing. Yeah, right.
– Bob Raissman, N.Y. Daily News.
OK, first of all, Major League Baseball pulls every baseball clip it finds from YouTube. That’s no secret. The league’s business model, for better or worse, includes maintaining exclusive rights to all baseball video on the Internet. These sites — SNY.tv’s network — have access to the video only because of a partnership with MLB.com. Technically MLB has the rights to all video taken in a Major League ballpark. Anything that makes any noise on YouTube comes down pretty quickly.
There’s no way Raissman doesn’t know that. I mean, I certainly hope not — he’s the sports media critic for a major newspaper in a huge market. Seems like he’s employing a bit of duplicity to get in a jab at MLB and Fox.
And you know who else distributed misleading information to communicate their platform? That’s right, the Nazis.
Settle down; I’m kidding. And I’m certainly not here to defend Tim McCarver for anything, ever. There are some places people with huge audiences simply should not go, and even mentioning Hitler, Stalin, the Nazis, hell, anything involving genocide — that’s one of them. No doubt. People are pretty sensitive about that stuff, and rightfully so.
But the backlash against McCarver is kind of amazing. I mean, look, the guy went all Godwin’s Law and said something he shouldn’t have. But it’s not like he said, “The Yankees systematically murdered millions of people.” He was arguing — perhaps incorrectly — that the Yankees were ominously ignoring a part of their history, and he pointed out, accurately, that terrible people from yesteryear did something similar.
I guess the thing is, I don’t understand why everyone’s so surprised that Tim McCarver said something stupid. The comparison doesn’t even crack the top 10 things Tim McCarver has said that most offended me. It’s just that this instance happened to be an affront to decency and not to logic, his usual stamping grounds.
Tedquarters 
I don’t really think it’s an out-of-bounds thing to say. People being airbushed from photos by the Kremlin is a great metaphor for any attempt to airbrush history, I think. It’s not talking about death camps. Sure, those particular people who were airbrushed had unhappy ends, but it was such a regular and absurd part of one of the major regimes of the 20th century, it’s just a great trope, I think.
(I’m not sure exactly what he said, and maybe bring the Nazis into it was dumb, as you can do it perfectly well with the Kremlin guys.)
As much as I’d support any excuse for taking McCarver off the air, this is ridiculous.
I dont know what he said but I would like to make a point. Ted I absolutely love the blogs about food here because we all love food but dont want to here about aromatic undertones… I will say Sandwich Week was awesome but we missed some blogs about baseball. Come on Ted, youre like Big Pelf abondoning his sinker and throwing the slider. What do you need a tip jar or something?
Yeah, I agree with the first two comments — I thought it was an excellent analogy, and he said absolutely nothing to minimize the holocaust or to compare Joe Torre to holocaust victims, as some in the media have suggested.
Just another prime example of phony outrage over harmless words.
i think part of the big deal is that the yankees werent treating torre badly tho. besides being insulted about being paid 5 million dollars a year plus incentives, torre left the yankees on his own to manage another team in the majors (for less money than the yankee’s insulting offer). then he wrote that book were he blasted the whole organization, especially the steinbrenners. i think it was neyer who said this was about an entitled jagov (my words, obvi) thinking he knew more about a situation than he did and trying to support his jagov entitled friend. it was also pointed out that casey stengel didnt get all the monuments and recognition etc until after he stopped coaching other teams in the majors.
tim mccarver is terrible, any excuse to fire him is a great one.