According to the old expression, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything. But if that were the case, you pretty much don’t have the Internet. You certainly don’t have critics.
But having acquired C.Y. Ruth’s Mets: The Complete History of the New York Mets, I feel I have to warn the baseball-reading public.
This is one of the reasons I don’t like reviewing self-published work for the most part. It’s a no-win situation. It reminds me of some of the contestants on shows like American Idol, who have been told by their loved ones how talented they are.We know how that turns out.
How anyone can have a “complete history” in 51 “pages” (Kindle edition) is a stretch. And how he acquired a “best seller” status (!) is beyond me, if this is any indication of his (or her?) other work.
From the few passages I read, there is little regard to accuracy in the final product, since I can’t say what it might have looked like in preliminary stages. This primarily comes in the form of misspelled names (and I’m the expert in misspelling, so I know what I’m talking about), although there are also mistakes in fact, as well as inappropriate punctuation and capitalization.
For starters, there was no such player as “Jimmy Piers all”; it was Piersall. You could forgive that once, but Young continues to refer to him as “Piers.” Similarly, there is no “Jerry Kosmas” (Jerry Koosman) or “Wes West rum,” the successor to manager Casey Stengel. Nor did Stengel break his hip by slipping in the shower, but rather getting out of a car. Further, the player who broke up Tom Seaver’s perfect game attempt in 1969 was Jimmy Qualls, not “Quails,” and the first baseman they acquired mid-season was Donn Clendenon, not “Don Clendenin.”
This is where I gave up.
Young has published similar Kindle books on the Red Sox, Cubs, Yankees, and Dodgers, some of which have gotten as high as a five-star rating on Amazon. To employ the Mets’ nickname, I find that amazin’.
So am I the bad guy here? Is there any way to sugar coat this?
is available on Amazon.com,
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No. There’s so much mediocre sports “literature” put out by mainstream publishers and written by “professional” writers, that we don’t need to give any kind of a break to shoddy work by amateurs. You are doing the public a service by calling this out.
I saw the Cubs version by the same author, and the text was lifted directly from a historical timeline published at the Cubs website. I suspect that the “author” simply re-appropriated text from the web, which might explain the spelling errors and stray spaces.
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