ShysterBall: Calcaterra: REVIEW: Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends

Remember how thrilled you were when the latest “Lefty O’” came out by Standish? Ok, maybe not. How bout Zanger’s “Major League Baseball” or Robinson’s “Baseball Stars of…” series? No?...Well, It’s the same feeling I get with Neyer’s “Big Book” series.

If Rob is OK with calling out Bill James’ hooey, I think he’s just fine with debunking sacred history.

But you know what? “Debunking” is probably the wrong word. “Debunking” implies a sort of impatient and disdainful exposure of frauds or perfidies, and that’s certainly not what Neyer is up to here. To the contrary, he is very respectful of the scores of old baseball legends he relates, telling each of them with care while adding the sort of context, detail, and flavor about which even their original relators likely had no idea. The result are stories, erroneous or otherwise, made all the richer by virtue of their retelling.

For example, there’s a funny old tale about how, in 1971, an aging Willie Mays took himself out of a game against the Astros in order to avoid the embarrassment of a fourth strikeout at the hands of a young and supremely intimidating J.R. Richard. But guess what? Neyer checked it out, and it turns out it never happened (get used to that, by the way; while Neyer confirms a handful of legends, most are shown to more truthy than actually true).

Are we worse off for learning that an archetypal passing-of-the-torch story like the Mays-Richard tale didn’t really happen the way we heard it the first time? Of course not, because rather than simply checking Retrosheet and reporting the falsity of the story with a wagging finger, Neyer takes the opportunity to tell us about the times the Say Hey Kid actually did get turned around four times in a game and, while he’s at it, explains why it was possible that Ray Chapman actually did once give up and walk back to the dugout before allowing Walter Johnson to ring him up with an inevitable strike three. As Neyer puts it in his introduction, we’re all the better off for learning about that stuff: