Baseball history is full of stories. The baseball yarn, usually told by an aging ex-player that begins with some variation of "there I was . . .", is a familiar and time-honored event. Every baseball fan can probably recount at least a half-dozen such stories from memory, if not more. Some of these stories have become treasured lore, woven into the mythology of the game. If you are a person who loves these sorts of stories unconditionally, then you should avoid this book at all costs. If, on the other hand, you are curious about the origin and veracity of these tall tales of the diamond, then this is the book for you.

Modern technology, by placing information at the fingertips of everyone from news reporters to your brother, has become the bane of faulty memories, puffery, and the tall tale. The availability of information can catch people in lies that change their careers, as Tim Johnson, former manger of the Toronto Blue Jays discovered when he was fired after it was revealed that he had lied about his service as a Marine in the Vietnam War. In Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Legends: The Truth, the Lies, and Everything Else, Neyer turns modern technology (mostly databases of boxscores and newspaper records) to a less serious purpose: checking up on a number of colorful yarns told through the years about baseball and figuring out if they can actually be confirmed as true, or were just made up as entertaining anecdotes.

The format of the book is pretty straightforward. In some ways, the book is sort of like a Mythbusters for the baseball yarn. A baseball story is presented, usually with attribution to one or more sources. The potentially verifiable facts of the story are then identified. Then Neyer sets to work, combing through team rosters, boxscores, and contemporaneous newspaper accounts to determine if the story is potentially true, or if it simply doesn't match the concrete data. Each story gets the treatment, and most are examined to see if you slightly change the facts that they could match. If there are similar stories involving different players, different teams, or a different time and place, they are usually examined as well. The stories range from the obscure, like the first one in the book concerning a shower of boiling beans, or whether a Chinese player was in organized baseball in the 1920s, to more notable ones like Lou Gehrig's supposed impostor, to the most famous of baseball legends Babe Ruth's called shot. Each story is presented with quotes and anecdotes from players, managers, umpires, and reporters while Neyer tries to match all the often varying accounts of events against the known facts.

At first blush one might think a book devoted to using boxscores from 1956 to fact check some story told by umpire Tom Gorman would be dry and uninteresting, but Neyer keeps the writing light and conversational, making the pages roll by. The stories are drawn from a wide range of baseball eras, from the early 1900s all the way up to the 1980s. Some of the stories will no doubt be familiar to most baseball fans, while some will probably be completely unknown, and some of the fun of the book is reading these obscure baseball stories which are often quite entertaining, even if they stretch the truth a little (or, as often seems to be the case, quite a bit). So, for a baseball fan who doesn't mind if the legendary exploits of his boyhood heroes turn out to have been a little exaggerated, this is highly recommended.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. ( )

Not one of Neyer's best - there seemed to be several errors in the book, and many of the stories were a little boring - only some were truly legendary. ( )

The best thing about baseball for me has always been the stories. I like the games as well, but it's all the lore and reputations and legends that really round it out and make it real. None of the other sports have this sense of diverse and odd history, as far as I know.

I've owned a number of baseball anecdote collections of various sorts over my life, mostly when I was a kid, but I never really stopped to think about how many of them were really true, if all the events and people and scores were as described in the stories I was reading or hearing. That's the sort of info I find interesting, so when one of my favorites (he might well be my favorite, really) baseball writers released a book of that sort, I had to pick it up.

The best thing about this book is that, while it purports to check through all these old stories (and does), it revives a lot of them that I myself have never heard. Lots of the ones from early in the twentieth century, about people that I had only heard of in passing, make their way into the book, and getting to read more baseball stories is fun in itself.

The format, though, makes it even better: you get the story, and then Neyer's research of the details of the story to see if it matches up in reality. In most cases, it's not quite right or outright wrong, but some of the stories turn out to be true, and that's the nicest of all; legends don't have to be true, certainly, but it's even better when they are.

There are also sidebars with shorter stories and quick checks, and some longer essays about specific topics (the editing of the Glory of Their Times being the best of the bunch, I think). The writing style is the light, conversational one Neyer uses in his columns, and it makes for easy reading. I suppose if you want to take your baseball stories with no context and no way of knowing if they're true, this isn't the book for you, but if you want to know more about your baseball stories, and want more of these tales of the pastime to boot, this is a very good way to go. ( )