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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.357
EAN num: 9780743284905
ISBN number: 0743284909
Label: Fireside
Manufacturer: Fireside
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 352
Printing Date: April 01, 2008
Publishing house: Fireside
Sale Popularity Level: 3639
Studio: Fireside
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
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 on their own, also tell us fascinating things about their main characters and about the sport's incredibly rich history. With his signature style, Rob gets to the heart of every anecdote, working through the particulars with careful research drawn from a variety of primary sources. For each story, he asks: Did this really happen? Did it happen, sort of? Or was the story simply the wild invention of someone's imagination? Among the scores of legends Neyer questions and investigates... - Did an errant Bob Feller pitch really destroy the career of a National League All-Star?
- Did Greg Maddux mean to give up a long blast to Jeff Bagwell?
- Was Fred Lynn the clutch player he thinks he was?
- Did Tommy Lasorda have a direct line to God?
- Did Negro Leaguer Gene Benson really knock Indians second baseman Johnny Berardino out of baseball and into General Hospital?
- Did Billy Martin really outplay Jackie Robinson every time they met?
- Oh, and what about Babe Ruth's 'Called Shot'?
Rob checks each story, separates the truths from the myths, and places their fascinating characters into the larger historical context. Filled with insider lore and Neyer's sharp wit and insights, this is an exciting addition to a superb series and an essential read for true fans of our national pastime.
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Rated by buyers -
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 sometime 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 discusion 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.
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