Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Legends: The Truth, the Lies, and Everything Else

by Rob Neyer

Book Overview

The latest and greatest in ESPN.com baseball guru Rob Neyer's Big Book series, Legends is a highly entertaining guide to baseball fables that have been handed down through generations.

The well-told baseball story has long been a staple for baseball fans. In Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Legends, Neyer breathes new life into both classic and obscure stories throughout twentieth-century baseball--stories that, while engaging...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743284909
• ISBN13: 9780743284905
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Touchstone Books
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.3" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Another solid effort

You can count on Rob Neyer for an interesting, informative and entertaining read when it comes to his Big Books. This is his third in the series (Lineups and Blunders being the first two). While it's interesting, I think it's the least interesting of the three. It's not necessarily Neyer's fault. The premise of the book is that Neyer takes some legendary tales and tracks them down (much easier today thanks to the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) retrosheet web site and some digitized newspapers), trying to prove whether or not they're true. And, if so, to what extent. Sometimes it turns out the tale is basically true with just a few minor errors. But, who really cares whether the score was 6-5 instead of 5-4, whether the home run was hit in the third inning instead of the fifth inning or if the incident occurred in August rather than July? Neyer and the book are at their best, however, when he proves a tale couldn't possibly have happened. Here's an example: Pitcher Nellie Briles tells the story that shortly after he joined the Pittsburgh Pirates, he was pitching in a game with the tying run on second base with two outs in the ninth inning. A left-handed pull hitter was at the plate, but second baseman Bill Mazeroski insisted upon playing up the middle, despite Briles' objections. The hitter singled through the hole, Clemente fielded the ball and threw out the potential tying run at the plate. After the game, Mazeroski explained to Briles that he and Clemente had been working on that play all year. Sounds like a great story, but Neyer couldn't find any game where the situation closely resembled what Briles described.

Great read for the baseball enthusiast!

This is the perfect gift for the man or woman you know who has enjoyed baseball all of their lives. Whether reading about the famous players or actually having lived during their times, it brings it all vividly home to the reader. There are wonderful anecdotes and stories and scenes painted for those legends that grow only stronger over time.

fickle memories

This is certainly an enjoyable book--but take it in small doses! It does a fine job--anecdotally--of addressing the problems of memory and embellishment and "improving" on stories. There are about 60 chapters, each of which presents a story--usually a recollection from a book about how player X did this-and-that. Neyer then tries to check out the validity--the internet and other resources are a great help. So, for example, Tris Speaker says that the Indians were leading the Yankees by 1 run in the 9th inning, the Yankees had the tying run on second base, and George Uhle issued an intentional walk to Mark Koenig in order to pitch to Babe Ruth. Neyer is able to use the internet and other resources to check the story out. There was a game--with Speaker getting an intentional walk, and with the score 3-1 (in Cleveland's favor) in the 8th inning, Combs singled, Koenig walked, and Ruth flied out. So memory here is partially correct, but also partially quite faulty. In addition to the 60-so chapters, most chapters have margin stories that may relate to the story in the chapter. So the total number of tales looked at is probably about 150 to 200. Many of these are fascinating, but some are not so memorable. There are a few errors--there's a "Last Note of Humility" about Chance and Harper, which belongs with an earlier chapter, for example. The most troubling tale (which I had never heard before) is "Lou Gehrig & The Imposter" about how Gehrig's consecutive-game streak had been broken, with Danny Kaye wearing Gehrig's uniform. Neyer tracks down the story to a men's magazine and finds a piece by Scribbly Tate describing the events. Scribbly Tate--an obvious pseudonym--is Rob Neyer himself, using his favorite alter-ego: he received $[...] for the story in 1951. "a tale whose origin lies in the most deceitful corner of my own forgetful mind" is how he describes it. I wondered whether Neyer was pulling our legs here--but a Google search reveals that Scribbly Tate is indeed Neyer's favorite pseudonym. I would have liked to have seen some additional analysis--what other tales did Scribbly Tate spin? Overall, though, what you get is a good and enjoyable addition to your baseball library, even if it does pop a few of your favorite misconceptions.

Fact or Legend

If you believe the line out of the great western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend", then you might have some problems with this book. Rob Neyer obviously spent ALOT of hours checking on the validation of several player stories from past books and articles. He proves that either some players have faulty memories, or some players like to appear to have faulty memories to make themselves look more heroic in stories. Either way, the book is still a very good read, and whether a story is validated, somewhat validated, or plain shot to heck, the stories can still be enjoyable.

Very Entertaining Read -- Probably Neyer's Best Book

This is the third of Neyer's "Big Books" and, I think, the best. (His Big Book of Baseball Lineups and Big Book of Baseball Blunders are also quite good - as is his lesser known Feeding the Green Monster; The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers is his one clinker.) In this book, he takes a large number of baseball "legends" and discusses whether or not they are true. I put legends in quotation marks because, although he includes an account of whether Babe Ruth really called that home run during the 1932 World Series and a few other famous incidents, most of the entries are really more stories than legends. Many are from autobiographies, newspaper or magazine stories, or sometimes just casual remarks made by television or radio play-by-play announcers. I really like Neyer's approach. Rather than just tell us what someone claims Bob Feller or Willie McCovey or Bob Gibson said or did, and then give us a quick summary of the results of his research - which would have resulted in a pretty short book - he takes several pages to relate what information is available to check the story, the blind alleys he went up, and the different approaches he took to confirm or refute the story. This more leisurely approach gives the reader a good feel for the variety of sources that exist for doing research on the history of baseball and also provides more context for each story - most of which are really not about earthshaking events. As it turns out, most of the stories he checks were at least roughly true, with only a relatively few apparently having been made up out of whole cloth. One caveat: like many books of this sort, this one is best read a few entries at a time spread out over a couple of weeks, rather than in one sitting. Finally, I found his discussion of Lawrence Ritter's oral history of early twentieth century baseball, The Glory of Their Times, to be particularly interesting. Although Ritter claimed that his book reproduced his interviews with baseball's early stars with very little editing, in fact, after comparing the book to CDs of the interviews Neyer finds that Ritter did substantial rewriting. Although Neyer argues that on balance Ritter's improving the old players' reminiscences was acceptable, I think it raises some interesting questions about the distinctions between a "good story" and a "true story" - which, I suppose, is the distinction that lies at the heart of Neyer's book.