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Tons of cool old baseball stories, complete with context checks.
Book #19: Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Legends
Author: Rob Neyer
Provenance: Bought online from Amazon.ca
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.
Next up: Fragile Things. This time, I'll actually read it.
Book #19: Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Legends
Author: Rob Neyer
Provenance: Bought online from Amazon.ca
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.
Next up: Fragile Things. This time, I'll actually read it.
