King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Rob Neyer's latest "Big Book" debunks some baseball legends and confirms a few, all without spoiling the fun.

Read more: Sports, Books, Baseball, Major League Baseball, Book reviews, King Kaufman, Sports Daily, MLB

April 16, 2008 | So I'm sitting in the Hard Knox Cafe on Potrero Avenue in San Francisco Tuesday with Emperor Norton and Babe Ruth, and we're talking about "Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Legends," the third in the ESPN baseball writer's "Big Book" series, following "Lineups" and "Blunders."

Everybody at the table but me has some pretty good tales to tell, of course. I keep hoping for an opening to drop in my story about meeting James Brown at the Salt Lake airport, but it's just not happening. The Emp's got a million of 'em about eating for free and printing his own money in the Gold Rush days, Ruth has them about speakeasies and dames and hitting adjectival home runs off of indelicacy pitchers who shot their Anglo-Saxon mouths off.

The stories are all good, some of them too good to believe.

That's what Neyer's book is like too. He collects and retells about 75 baseball stories, legends, myths and tall tales, then does some detective work, often through the miraculous Retrosheet.org, to try to figure out if the stories are true or not.

"This book," he writes, "isn't for everybody. Seriously." If you really want to believe that the Babe called his shot and Tommy Lasorda had a hilarious conversation with God in his last pitching performance, which ended on a crazy triple play, well, I don't want to give everything away, but this book might not be for you.

Neyer writes that he didn't set out to debunk these great stories, necessarily, "but when you pile some literal truth on top of the truthiness? Delicious as frosting on a sugar cookie."

Full disclosure: Neyer and I are friendly e-mail acquaintances.

"I like what Bill James wrote in the foreword," Emperor Norton is saying as his dogs, Bummer and Lazarus, dance the Macarena together.

"Referring to the 'explosion of knowledge' the Internet has put at our fingertips, he writes, 'It's a little sad. Paper-thin lies, once protected by layers of darkness, are now transparent in the glare. We know now that it wasn't Mickey Mantle in the batter's box, it was Roger Repoz, and it wasn't the ninth inning, it was the fourth, and the bases weren't loaded, and the score wasn't tied, and the frog did not become a prince."

Next page: You can skip the debunking -- but does debunking really ruin the pleasure of a ton of beans raining down on Red Sox fans?