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From Left Field  TIM McCARVER ...thinks Torre was slighted |
OUT OF LEFT FIELD:
McCarver on Torre:
Both wrong and right
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
Tim McCarver’s thinking was admirable. His history was off. That got him into a bit of a pickle for which he was classy enough to apologize.
Working the Fox telecast of the Yankees’ Old Timer’s Day festivities July 17, McCarver derided the Yankees for making a non-person out of Joe Torre, their former manager. Torre had tremendous success with the Yankees--managing them to 12 years in post-season play and four World Series championships. But because he criticized management after he left, he has been treated as something of a leper.
McCarver recognized this in seeing how little exposure Torre was given during the Old Timer’s celebration. He accused the Yankees of “airbrushing” Torre out of the history.
Specifically, he said, “You remember some of those despotic leaders in World War II, primarily in Russia and Germany, where they used to take those pictures of former generals who were no longer alive….They would airbrush the generals out of the pictures. In a sense that’s what the Yankees have done with Joe Torre.”
McCarver went wrong in mentioning the Nazis. No baseball controversy can be compared to the evils of the Nazi regime. It got him this spanking from the Anti-Defamation League: “No matter what one thinks of the Yankees’ treatment of Joe Torre, likening it to how German and Russia treated their generals who fell out of favor is an inappropriate comparison.”
McCarver agreed his comparison to Germany and Russia was inappropriate. He accepted the criticism (“I am a big boy.”) He apologized.
McCarver would have gotten his point across eloquently enough if he had his history correct. It wasn’t the German or Russian generals he should have cited, but Soviet politics. In the days of Communist rule in Russia, photos were published of the Soviet hierarchy, Leon Trotsky, Lavrentiy Beria among others. When a Trotsky or Beria were deposed, they were eliminated from photos.
That was floating around McCarver’s active brain but he got mixed up. German and Russian soldiers were not part of that history.
But McCarver’s point about Torre being slighted by petty Yankee policy stands. And he didn’t apologize for that. He is ever the stand-up guy.
The incident points up anew what a significant broadcaster McCarver is. He enlightened Mets fans about baseball for more than a decade. He is forthright, opinionated, incisive, witty, a good partner to whomever he is working with and entertaining. He would laughingly admit that at times he fits the description: “Often wrong, but never in doubt.”
It’s hard to understand why McCarver
has not been put on the ballot for the baseball hall of Fame’s
broadcast wing. I have a vote and would eagerly make him a number
one selection if he were put on the ballot.
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The outpouring
of tributes to Yankee owner George Steinbrenner upon his death
recently went light on his felony of contributing illegally to
the Nixon presidential campaign and his sleazy act of hiring
a private investigator to report on Dave Winfield---which got
him suspended from baseball.
This was mindful of the time Senator Joe McCarthy died. McCarthy, the anti-Communist scourge, had pilloried Dean Acheson as secretary of state, trying to drive him out of government. When Acheson was asked to comment at McCarthy’s death, he responded: De mortuis nil nisi bonum. (Of the dead speak nothing but good).
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An added element to my generous attempts to help popularize soccer for Americans revolves around the dimension of time during World Cup play.
Soccer matches are slated for 90 minutes, 45-minute halves. But the clock runs without stoppages through out-of-bounds delays, injuries (real and fake), arguments and stalling. It is frustrating for a trailing team to see the leading team eating up the clock with leisurely actions in crucial late moments of a game.
This motivated me to put a stop watch on the World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands. My findings:
There were 30 minutes and 50 seconds of
actual play during the 45-minute first half.
There were 27 minutes and 50 seconds of actual play during the
45-minute second half.
That added up to 58 minutes of actual play during the 90-minute game.
The averages for the extra time added during the first and second half--and the 30-minute extra period--pretty much equaled the ratios during the regular 90 minutes of play.
Conclusion: It would make more sense to schedule a 60-minute game and stop the clock for balls out of play, injuries and arguments. That would end the dreaded stalling tactics.
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The frequent use of pitchers during the baseball All Star game brings us closest to the day when managers use one pitcher per inning in regular season games.
The American League used 10 All Star pitchers, the Nationals nine. Only three pitchers were allowed to pitch as many as two innings. Seven pitchers threw less than an inning.
Prediction: The day will come when a manager strapped for front line pitching, will decide to use one pitcher per inning in regular season play.
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The death at 87 last week of Clint Hartung, the New York Giants’ gentle giant of the 1940s and ’50s, brings to mind a story.
Hartung was hailed as a combination Babe
Ruth and Christy Mathewson when he came out of the service. He
didn’t come close to living up to expectations. He had a
mediocre career.
Bill Roeder wrote a sympathetic story in The New York World
Telegram that chronicled Hartung’s trials. This ran
on the Scripps-Howard news service. When the Giants traveled
up from the south during spring training the next season, papers
along the route, which had saved the story, ran it when the Giants
were in town. Hartung, not wise to the ways of newspaper practice,
stopped Roeder one day. He said, “Bill, I wish you would
stop writing that story about me."
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For a long time I’ve searched for appropriate names for the two cardinals on the front of the colorful St. Louis Cardinals’ uniforms. Stan Musial was always right for one, but Dizzy Dean, Red Schoendienst, Lou Brock or Bob Gibson didn’t quite fit for the other..
Now it is evident that the Musial bird should be joined by an
Albert Pujols bird.
Call those redbirds, Stan and Albert.
©2010 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted July 26, 2010.
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