Times for another baseball review

Crazy how the NY Times posts its stories.

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about their lack of baseball book reviews, despite the buzz about some of the bigger titles. So what happens? They published two on-line: Charles Leerhsen’s Ty Cobb bio and Jon Pessah’s baseball business tome. Except the Leerhsen piece appeared in print on May 31, and the Pessah piece yesterday. In addition, the Times published a review of Bill Pennington’s bio on Billy Martin.

Since I already wrote about the reception give to Leerhsen’s and Pessah’s work, I’ll just comment on the Pennington title here.

I included that one in a recent Bookreporter.com baseball feature. I found it to be a fast-moving look at the volatile Martin’s life and career. When discussing the book with fellow baseball aficionados, I was informed that there were numerous factual mistakes. I freely admit, I don’t study the books as some do, so I missed them. We went back and forth about who is responsible for sussing them out, the author or the editor. Perhaps in an ideal world, every editor would be an expert on the subject, but obviously that’s not the case. And since authors can spend several years working on their project, it behooves them to be as accurate as possible.

The review by Maxwell Carter (who “writes frequently on popular culture for the Book Review and other publications,” according to the Times‘ squib) points out one such mistake — that Yankee GM George Weiss won The Sporting News executive of the year four times, not 10 as Pennington had written. But Carter also writes “Martin, who may be the only manager to have thrown dirt at an umpire.” Even if we’re being absolutely literal here — “throwing” instead of “kicking”; “on” instead of “at” — I doubt that’s true. It would be hard to believe that in the 150-plus history of the game this hasn’t been done on some professional level.

I also found his comment this passage a bit odd: “Martin soon caught on with the Idaho feeder squad of Casey Stengel’s Oakland Oaks (or, the minor league of the minor leagues).” Someone would have to tell me if that last part is technically true or just fanciful writing by the reviewer.

Despite the errors, the review was fairly positive, as Carter concludes, “In “Billy Martin,” Pennington savors the dirt-kicking spectacles without losing sight of the man.”