* Another "uh-oh" moment for Steinbrenner author

That is, according to this entry onthe Yankee-centric RiverAvenueBlues blog regarding Peter Golenbock’s latest release,George: The Poor Little Rich Boy Who Built the Yankees Empire.

Why isn’t George higher up on my reading list? Other than having more interesting books ahead of it, there’s another reason: factual accuracy. Murray Chass (h/t BBTF) points to Goldenbock’s history of inaccuracies, and warns of much the same from George. This isn’t just Chass’s criticism; these errors have been acknowledged by the book’s publisher…John Wiley & Sons, which said in part, “Regarding Peter Golenbock’s book, we are currently taking steps internally to correct the errors which will be reflected in the next reprint.”

So how many errors are we talking about here?

Sixty-eight factual errors. Don’t they pay people to go through books and find these? It might seem like Chass nitpicks with some of these errors, but I don’t take issue at all. If Golenbock is making simple errors on things like hotel names and the handedness of a batter (uh, Duke Snider was a righty?), what other lazy errors is he making? (emphasis in the original)

This has always been a bugaboo for me. I’ve spoken with publishers’ representatives about this and they said they just don’t have the personnel to check every fact. It’s up to the author to make sure he’s got his stuff together; you won’t always get an editor who’s an expert on the subject.

It’s a safe bet that the majority of the readers — even those well versed on the topic— might not catch these mistakes. But whenever I do, I wonder how many more I’ve haven’t found and that detracts from the reading experience.

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Tagged as: George Steinbrenner, Peter Golenbock

BaseballinDC

Murray Chass – the guy who said that he doesn’t understand new baseball stats such as VORP? TThe guy who says Baseball Perspectus and its ilk are “stat mongers?”

Not exactly the guy whose opinion I really want to follow. I read his take on George and the only actual error of Golenback’s he cited was a misnaming of a hotel (!)?
http://ronkaplan.wordpress.com/ ronkaplan

With all dues respect, I doubt the publisher would issue a press release stating it’s intentions to correct the errors if there were only one or two.

I haven’t read the book yet, and I don’t know how many I would catch, but I would tend to go with Chass on this, since he was covering the team on a daily basis. On numbers, perhaps not, but on this, yes. Unfortunately, Golenbock does have a reputation for this sort of thing. I don’t believe he’s doing anything to purposely mislead (again, I don’t know what kind of errors, RiverAveBlues is talking about); perhaps they’re just careless ones, a la Jim Reisler.