Photo courtesy of the MLB.com

By now you’ve probably heard of Tim McCarver’s comments on the FOX Saturday broadcast, where he compared the Yankee front office to the Nazi and Communist regimes. If not, here it is again (video):

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.

The New York Time Bats blog has a follow up to the story, where Timmy backtracks a tiny bit.

McCarver, a close friend of Torre’s, said Monday in an interview from Florida that his analogies between the Yankees and the Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union were “inappropriate.” But he added, “In my opinion, the underlying point here remains true: Yankees management has erased Joe Torre from their history.” He said, “I don’t think the Yankees have embraced the image of Joe Torre.”

McCarver said he had seen the photographs of Torre that hang at the new stadium but that he did not believe the team does enough to honor Torre’s integral role in leading the Yankees to four World Series championships. “Retiring his number would mean embracing his legacy,” he said.

Jason Zillo, the Yankees’ director of media relations, called the Fox truck on Saturday to complain about McCarver’s comments. In a statement issued Monday, Fox Sports said that McCarver “regrets” using the World War II analogy and that it would take no action.

So until Torre has his number retired, Timmy won’t be happy. Gotcha. He might want to call his friend and ask him whose idea it was that he wouldn’t return to the stadium. If he had any intention of being fair he might ask himself how he would feel if he was Hal Stienbrenner, owned the Yanks and a former employee wrote a book saying some of the nasty things Torre did about his father, painting him as a bully and a buffoon, and Torre’s saying his experience with a father who beat his mother regularly prepared him for working with George. George was a man who, as we all know, was too addled by dementia to defend himself from Torre’s remarks at the time.

From Fox’s point of view, they might actually like the idea that Tim has stirred up a bit of controversy here. People may tune in the next time he does a Yankee game just to hear if he says something even dumber. For the rest of us, it just cements a suspicion Yankee fans have long had about Tim. That he’s still bitter about the way his (very short) tenure as Yankee analyst ended, that he’s always been someone who favors the National League style of the game, and that he is completely blind and one sided when it comes to Joe Torre. I’m not sure Tim has really been all that relevant for many years now, but this episode takes him from to obscurity to oblivion for me. I’ll never again get too worked up over anything he says from this point forward, since I know where it’s coming from.