* RK Review: Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Legends

May 2, 2008

The Truth, The Lies, and Everything Else, Fireside, 2008.

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.527231&w=425&h=350&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26] from youtube.com


I have been meaning to review this one for awhile but a comment submitted by a Bookshelf reader about Fay Vincent’s We Would Have Played for Nothing prodded me to get the lead out.

“BaseballinDC” wrote:

Re the Vincent book. These are horribly executed in my mind. I read a few chapters of the first and skimmed the second. They’re just 20 pages worth of unedited rambling. There’s no guidance, questions, etc. to shape them. It’s actually an embarrasing (sic) job.

One of the best chapters in Neyer’s very entertaining book regards “The Hidden Genius of Lawrence S. Ritter.” Ritter was the author/editor of The Glory of Their Times, the first collection of oral history that made it big and set the gold standard of the genre. He traveled around the country with a heavy reel-to-reel tape recorder to interview early 20th-century ballplayers. When I read it many years ago, I was amazed how eloquent these gentlemen were, nothing like the ignorant rubes I’d read about in other books.

But, according to Neyer, it turns out that they had a little help from their friend, Ritter, whose version is not quite the same as printed transcripts bear out. (In Vincent’s case — and without having the transcripts of audio, it would be impossible to tell — it would seem there was little or no editing of his subjects.)

I am embarrassed to say — at my relatively advanced age — I was stunned. Did Ritter make up stuff, adding a bit of dramatic flair here and there, to produce a better story? If he did, did interviewers/editors/ writers? Apparently so. But, yes, Virginia, there still is a Santa Claus.

Neyer “deconstructs” more than 75 events. Each begins with the excerpt from the pertinent source, usually a book or magazine article (lots of “as told to’s” here). And then Neyer starts to fillet.

Using resources such as retrosheet.org and baseball-reference.com, he goes about refuting point after point: Pitcher A never faced batter B on a sunny day in June, so the batter couldn’t have hit a two-run homer to win the game. The baserunner didn’t steal third in the second game of a doubleheader in scorching conditions when the fielder fainted while covering the bag. The manager didn’t get ejected by the home plate umpire, because according to official sources, the ump was in another city, at another base, in another league. And all aspirin’s alike.

All of which brings up, to me, the most interesting point: memory.

The video above (the best I could find for the song, sorry) begs the issue. Aside from the potential “contributions” from oral historians, are the players deliberately “misremembering” the details in an effort to inflate their heroics? Or is it simply a matter of forgetting? A thought-provoking episode of NPR’s “Radio Lab” considered how memory fades a little bit every time the person recollects, degenerating like succeeding generations of photocopies. We don’t mean to mis-state, but we can’t help it. And naturally we don’t believe we’re doing anything but being absolutely faithful to that memory.

I enjoyed that program so much, I’m including it here for your listenting pleasure:

In the book’s foreword, Bill James writes, “It is such a strange idea, that knowledge of the past can be created — and yet it can be and is every day.” He describes how technology has made it easy to check on such claims in situations where facts sometimes got in the way of a good story. “A lot of the old [writers], they didn’t worry about that…they just wrote down what they remembered and called it right, and who’s going to argue?”

(By the way, Jose Canseco’s memory and perception of events in Juiced and Vindicated have been called into questions, so it’s not just the old-timers who are “guilty” of these questionable recollections.)

A few reviewers have complained that the author is being too picky. Why deny these old timer’s their moment, they ask? In his preface, Neyer writes, “The stories tell us something about their subjects and they tell us something about those who tell the stories. It is neither unfair nor disrespectful to check those stories, and in fact, I will argue that publishing — and yes, checking — these old stories is a great sign of respect. Because only a good story well told is worth all this effort.”

Neyer also says the truth is just as interesting as the myth. But I would say this: If the players he writes about held the same beliefs, perhaps they never would have bothered to tell those stories, in which case his book would never have been written.

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1 * BaseballinDC May 3, 2008 at 7:21 am

One reason I give Vincent such a hard time is that he is almost uniquely qualified to write such books as these. As a former Commissioner of Baseball, he has access to players most writers do not. He also has access to the records and research capabilities of the Hall of Fame, which are probably accessible, but not on the priority that would be given to Vincent. Finally, as a former big time lawyer, Vincent possesses the skills to question players, analyze their comments and provide context. Had another author without Vincent’s resources written them, I wouldn’t really have thought twice.

These books could have been “written” by literally anyone with the $3000 per player needed to get them to tape their memories. If he really wants to be an author, he should go, meet with them and actually interview them. My understanding (and please correct me if I’m wrong) is that he did not do this even though he could have. The project of preserving these memories is just too important to me not to comment on this.

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