of yesterday’s game, the less said the better; fortunately i have an interview ready to go. last thursday i talked to ESPN’s rob neyer about his latest offering, Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends. neyer is often thought of as strictly a numbers guy, but that's not really true --- witness this book, which is essentially a work of history. neyer delves into dozens of oft-retold baseball stories and tries to sift out fact from fiction. a lot of the stories are ones you’ve heard many times --- there’s a long section on The Babe’s called shot, perhaps the most famous baseball legend ever --- but there are also a lot of delightful ones that you’ve never heard before. you'll find quite a bit of st louis material in the book too, including multiple appearances by dizzy dean and whitey herzog and a refershingly liberal dose of st louis browns lore.

neyer and i started out talking about the book and veered off into discussions of al hrabosky, brian bannister, greg maddux, and other random subjects. i also got the chance to spot-check one or two of neyer’s own memories. thanks to rob for taking the time to chat --- you can find the Big Book of Baseball Legends in the stores or order it online via www.robneyer.com. (and keep on eye on the website; some of the baseball legends that didn’t make the cut for the book may be posted there periodically this summer . . . . ).

What prompted the subject matter for this book?
Well, I had done quite a bit of research when I worked for Bill James back in the early 90s. Bill published "Tracers" --- some of which I wrote and some of which he wrote, but almost all of which I researched ---- we published some of those in all three of the Bill James Baseball Books I worked on [1990 through 1992]. Each of those had a few things we called "Tracers." I always enjoyed that work. That was probably my favorite task that he gave me. I would go to the library --- this was pre-Retrosheet, obviously --- I would go to the library and pore over microfilm literally all day long, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I’m lucky enough that my editor at Fireside gives me a fair amount of leeway in what I write. It wasn’t a situation where we had to try to figure out what the market was for a book of that type. I just decided I wanted to do this book, and we hoped that there was a market for it.

How did you pick out the stories? You mentioned in the foreword that these are favorites of yours --- are we talking about notes written on scraps of paper that you’ve had tucked in a folder somewhere?
Some of them I did have saved up. I had a few saved up from when I worked for Bill; I had an old file folder labeled "Tracers" that I’ve kept for all these years. And when I read baseball books, I tend to make notes on the last page of the book, including notes about possible stories to check. I went through most of the Baseball Digests from the 1950s and 1960s looking for stories. I went through a number of collections of oral histories, which are probably the best source for these sorts of stories. I have a pretty significant baseball library; I could have found literally thousands of stories. At times I would research a story immediately when I found it, but usually I’d just type it into my computer and then look for more stories. And then when I realized I had enough, I stopped collecting and started researching.

In writing your introduction, it seemed like you went out of your way to convey your sense of affection for these stories --- that even though you are debunking a lot of them, you’re doing it in a spirit of respect. I got the sense that perhaps you want to distance yourself from the sort of angry, mocking type of debunking of baseball tradition that is so often found these days, particularly on the Internet. You really empathize with these stories.
Oh sure --- I love a well-told story, and it really doesn’t matter to me if it’s true or not. Maybe because it’s I’m not a great storyteller personally. I can write a story out, but if you and I were sitting in a bar having a couple of beers and I was trying to tell you a good story, I would mess it up about 10 seconds in. I have a real affection and respect for people who can tell a story well. I don’t think the word "debunk" ever entered my head in this entire process. It was really just me being curious about what really happened. As when, as was often the case, the facts didn’t exactly match the story, that’s fine --- let’s find out what did happen. Let’s try to find out where the story might have come from, where the kernel of truth really is. In most of these, there was something there. I don’t think that most of these stories were fabricated out of whole cloth. I think they all evolved from something solid. I wish I could have found that solid thing more often than I did, but I did go to some effort to check out other possibilities, to try to figure out where a story could have come from, what might have actually happened.

The one that pops into my mind is the Whitey Herzog story about Vince Coleman stealing a base in a game the Cardinals led 10-3 over the Giants. Almost every particular of the story was wrong --- and of course this story was published; it wasn’t something Herzog told in a radio interview, it appeared in one of his books --- but he had the year wrong, he had the score wrong, he had the inning wrong. Almost every particular of the story was wrong. But the essence of the story was completely true, and the fact that he had all the details wrong almost doesn’t matter.
What’s interesting about that story to me is that I think it’s just as good a story with the actual particulars. Sometimes when a story changes, the storyteller --- whether consciously or unconsciously --- has made the story better, more entertaining. I don’t know if this one is better the way Herzog tells it than it would be if you told it with all the facts. I think he just forgot all the facts. [Here's the actual box score --- see the bottom of the 5th inning.]

In this case, the real facts are actually better than hazy facts in Herzog’s story. In the process of getting to the truth, the story has become a more rich one.
I hope so. That was the idea generally --- to make the stories even more interesting and more illuminating. I think too that in the course of doing the research and going line by line into these things, we discovered some other things that weren’t mentioned in the original story at all. So I hope there’s some added value there. There’s also a lesson in the Herzog story, which is that I believe his book came out in 1999, and the actual incident took place I think in 1986 --- either 1988 or 1986.

The actual incident took place in 1986, but Herzog remembered it as 1987.
Right, 1987 --- when the Giants were good. And so essentially we’ve got a story that Herzog was recalling 12 or 13 years after the fact, and getting many of the details wrong. Now think of how many stories are told about things that happened 40, 50, 60 years ago. You wonder how many of those details must be way off. I love the stories, but I know people who take their baseball history seriously. And if you take it seriously, then you want to know what really happened.

interview continues after the jump . . . . 

Continue reading this post »