Earlier this month, The New York Times called out Matt McCarthy for supposed errors and misstatements in his new book Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit. I must admit, I was convinced. After all, it is The New York Times we’re talking here. They wouldn’t make such an accusation if it wasn’t true. Would they?
Yes, according to Dave Whelan, sports business columnist in this article on Forbes.com.
The New York Times took a swipe at Odd Man Out last week, claiming that it was sloppily written and error-ridden. He appears to have incorrectly dated some anecdotes–because some of the players involved showed up on the team days afterward or left days earlier. The other supposed errors fall into the he-said she-said category. Altogether it’s yawn-provoking, compared with the exposés of admittedly fraudulent memoirs like Angel at the Fence, about a Holocaust romance that never transpired.
Ironically, the Times‘ story itself had the same kind of minor errors it accuses McCarthy of, except that his book was 300 pages. The Times referred to shortstop Erick Aybar as Manny Aybar. Coach Kernan Ronan had his name reversed to Ronan Kernan. And most seriously, the story mistakenly says that the head coach of the team, Tom Kotchman, encouraged his players to take steroids when the book attributes that only to another embittered player and describes Kotchman as warning his players to avoid the temptation.
“Aybar and Ronan were never in the main article,” but in a sidebar that ran on the Web site, says Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty, who acknowledged that corrections were made on the newspaper’s Web site. The Kotchman accusation was correctly attributed to a player, not Kotchman himself, she added. (Though it’s difficult to read the article that way, as the passage says: “…the manager described [in the book] at various times as implicitly suggesting to Dvorsky [a player] that he try steroids (Dvorsky denies this).”)
So what is at issue here? The degree of error? Placing an event on a Tuesday when it’s really a Monday? Putting the score at 4-2 instead of 5-2?
In the Forbes piece, Whelan notes that McCarthy changed some of the names in his book. True, but he doesn’t let you know this until the acknowledgments. I think this is a tactical decision that could be construed as misleading: If the reader had been told up front about these “changes “for the sake of their sanity and mine,” it might have put the book in a whole different light.
Forbes: Baseball fans will recognize the stars Joe Saunders, Prince Fielder, Bobby Jenks and Ervin Santana. But other names you changed. How did you decide which names to change?
McCarthy: The names that are changed are the ones who are no longer affiliated with baseball.
Forbes: But your nemesis in the book is identified and he’s no longer in the league.
McCarthy: He’s identified. But I talk about him signing autographs for mentally challenged kids. So much of the media portrayal of professional athletes is that they are all carbon copies. The guys I was surrounded with were 3-D. They had worries. They had good days and bad days.
I’ve received a few comments and emails from people in McCarthy’s corner. I’m still on the fence, and I don’t know what would sway me one way or the other.
is available on Amazon.com,
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Um, this is a lot more than “the degree of error.” There is persuasive evidence that significant incidents were fabricated.
Here’s one I documented on my blog:
http://futureangels.mlblogs.com/archives/2009/03/odd_man_out_boxed_in.html
McCarthy wrote about an alleged incident in Ogden where he claims manager Tom Kotchman ordered pitcher Hector Astacio to deliberately throw at an Ogden batter, after Provo shortstop Erick Aybar was hit twice by pitches. When Astacio refused, Kotchman allegedly yanked him from the game.
As I documented, and as the NYT documented, no Provo batter was hit by a pitch in the game.
Furthermore, it seems unlikely that McCarthy would have even been in the dugout to hear that. McCarthy was the starting pitcher the night before. The usual routine is for the previous game’s starting pitcher to be in the stands behind home plate in civilian attire, typically charting or working the radar gun. So how could he have heard Kotchman give such an order?
But then, why would Kotchman have ordered a retaliation pitch when there was no reason to retaliate in the first place?
McCarthy then claims he went to the clubhouse to use the bathroom, where he consoled Astacio. That story has problems too.
For openers, the visitors’ clubhouse is not connected to the visitors’ dugout. The clubhouse is accessed through a door in the left-center field fence. The dugout is on the first base line. Certainly Kotchman and pitching coach Kernan Ronan would have seen McCarthy in civilian attire sprinting across the field when he should have been charting behind home plate.
But then why would he go all the way out there to use the bathroom, when there was one right under the concourse?
I’ve spoken with several people named in the book. To a man, they all say scenes where they’re mentioned are fictional.
McCarthy has a big publishing company behind him to tell his side of the story. Most of these ex-players have gone on to obscure lives in blue-collar jobs. Tom Kotchman can take care of himself, but who’s going to speak for these guys?
Everything I’ve written about this book is at this link:
http://comment.mlblogs.com/search?tag=Odd%20Man%20Out&IncludeBlogs=980
Thanks for your time.
Stephen Smith
FutureAngels.com
What to think, what to do. . .
The bottom line is I think the book’s inaccuracies are a serious breach for the simple reason that this is supposed to be a work of non-fiction. It’s like saying cheating on your homework is OK, as long as you don’t harm anyone else in the process. I feel very strongly that if you’re going to publish names, dates and places, you must get them right. Period.
For example, if med-student McCarthy had submitted a clinical analysis paper for a class assignment, he’d be required to use data from his personal lab notebook PLUS background information from third-party, legitimate sources. If it were determined he’d made up a couple of data points or didn’t properly cite the other sources, he’d have gotten a failing grade. If he was a professional investigative journalist, like Dan Rather, and made these sorts of mistakes, well, . . .you know what happened to him.
As for the question of whether the mistakes should be used to judge the rest of the book, I honestly can’t chime in, since I haven’t read the book. Based on reading the descriptions and disappointments from so many seasoned baseball readers, it sounds like a well-written and entertaining book. Makes it even more of a shame that McCarthy applied such a cavalier hand in blurring the boundaries of truths and lies. Unfortunately, the best crafted lies contain a good proportion of truth in order to establish a bond of trust with the soon-to-be-victim. In short, the lesson seems to be. . .Enjoy the book. Just don’t believe everything you read. Applies to lots of things in life, don’t you think?
And yet the bigger questions remain: Why include discredible dates and stats? Why deliberately change some names and not others? Readers are pretty forgiving about misrememberinggeneralities and the occasional date and/or name in a memoir. However, in this age of Google, surely he knew people would double-check any keyword that could be entered into a search-engine query. BTW, I think accusing a daily newspaper of making the same degree of mistakes as a traditionally published book is a bit of an unfair swipe–newspapers do not have the luxury of time and multiple revisions.
At any rate, I think this affair makes McCarthy look either careless or incompetent. Doesn’t make his editor look so smart either. I wouldn’t want to rely on Dr. McCarthy to read my x-rays or make a diagnosis, that’s for sure. . .BeesGal
Those who might be interested in reading an account of life in the minors that’s not full of lies and inaccuracies should check out John and Rick Wolff’s Harvard Boys, which was reviewed here at this site last year: http://rksbaseballbookshelf.wordpress.com/2008/01/16/review-harvard-boys-a-father-and-sons-adventures-playing-minor-league-basebll/
Have you bothered to follow-up on this? It turns out The New York Times invented many of the so-called errors in McCarthy’s book and took others grossly out of context. Odd Man Out isn’t being retracted. They’re not even publishing a revised edition. The New York Times should be held accountable for such irresponsible journalism.
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