Bits and pieces

Ted Cox, the TV/Radio sports columnist for the Arlington Heights Daily Herald, evidently has as little patient as I do when it comes to errors in baseball books. For an industry whose main product is numbers (overwhelmingly maintained via computer technology), it’s inexcusable that so many factual errors pop up. As Cox writes in his April 20 entry on the new edition of Baseball Prospectus:

… [T]he emphasis on writing makes it all the more irksome that I detected a record number of errors in the text this season. In the first sentence of the first team entry, for the Arizona Diamondbacks, it says the Snakes “aren’t afraid to show expensive veterans the to the door.” And as I pored through the book, preparing for my fantasy draft, time and again I was caught up by some typo or editing snafu.

While giving credit to the BP editors for their excellent Web site, Cox is less enthusiastic with the book.

I’m tempted to start keeping track of the mistakes in the book and compare the count from year to year — present a writing “range factor” on the order of a Bill James. But in this case I think the writing alone will have to carry it. No baseball fan has a tolerance for errors, and that goes for reading about the sport as much as for the action on the field of play.

While serving on a committee judging baseball books, I read A Great Day in Cooperstown: The Improbable Birth of Baseball’s Hall of Fame by Jim Reisler. Like Cox, I was amazed at the number of errors that made it into print. One of the more egregious mistakes was the attribution of a testimonial for one of the first batch of inductees. The author has the laudable remarks, supposedly uttered at the Hall’s opening ceremony, coming from an ex-player who had been dead more more than a decade.

Certain errors are understandable: the rush to get the book out puts a lot of pressure on all parties involved in the process, especially for annuals such as Baseball Prospectus, which can hit the bookstores shortly after the final out of the World Series (one title hailed the Mets championship season before the season was even over!). But that doesn’t make them excusable, espcially in the case of a project such as Reisler’s, which presents itself as a work of historical importance, rather than transitory eyewash. Publishers must be aware of the importance of fact-checking and find someone who can catch the mistakes at the early stages.

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The Washington Post ran a review on The Gashouse Gang: How Dizzy Dean, Leo Durocher, Branch Rickey, Pepper Martin and Their Colorful, Come-From-Behind Ball Club Won the World Series — and America’s Heart — During the Great Depression, by John Heidenry (Public Affairs). Allan Barra offers his review of the book in the Houston Chronicle.

Read a excerpt from the publisher’s Web site.

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From Editor and Publisher, this article about Ross and David Newhan, an unusual father and son baseball combination. Other families have had both dads and kids in the major leage ranks — the Griffeys, the Bonds — but as far as I know, only one has had the pater as a Hall of Fame sportswriter and the progency as a ballplayer.