Joe Posnanski

OK, yes, it’s another new look for the blog. I have an excuse this time … it’s sort of like the old look (with a new photo on top) and my understanding is this is a much more secure and functional template. And no, I cannot believe I just wrote the words “secure and functional template” like I know what I’m talking about.

So, this is a Q&A with my friend Rob Neyer, who has just written Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends, and yes, I’m jealous of anyone big enough to put his name in the title of all his books. To name drop for a moment, I count three such people as friends — Dave Barry, Bill James and Rob Neyer — and I’ve never asked any of them if they feel at all self-conscious about having their names on their books. I suspect excessive book sales help them overcome their demureness.*

*I can say without a doubt that this is the first time I have ever used the word “demureness.”

Rob’s Book of Legends is a fun book where he tells some of the great stories in baseball history and then, uh, well, squashes them like bugs. No, that’s not exactly right. He lets the people tell these legendary stories, and then he fact checks them. Rob’s theory is that fact is an interesting as fiction, and I have to say: He’s right. The book really works for me. Not to get too deep here, but I think you get three things in this book.

1. You get to hear some great baseball stories like how Bill Mazeroski used to sometimes play close to second base in order to let balls go through to Roberto Clemente, allowing him to unleash his spectacular throws.

2. You get to find out just how true these stories are.

3. And this is my favorite thing, you really get some great insights into human nature. You learn how the mind works, how legends (and sometimes myths) are created, how stories get exaggerated (not that I would EVER do that), and also how hopeful we are as fans for the legends (and myths) to be TRUE. That was my overriding theme as a reader of this book. I would read this great story and think, “Wow, I really hope that’s true because that’s great.”

Sometimes they were true. Sometimes they were slightly off. Sometimes they were completely untrue — at least the specifics. It really makes for fun reading.*

*And I’m not just saying this because Rob paid me lots of money. I’m saying this in the hope that Rob will pay me lots of money.

OK, here’s the interview:*

*I totally forgot to do this before — the excellent Web site Shysterball has an excellent review of Rob’s book. I need to do better with my links.

* * *

First off, I really, really liked the Legends book — it seems like a real departure for you. Unlike your other books, you are debunking (and also bunking) some of the great legends in baseball history. I love the warning you offer at the beginning (“This book isn’t for everyone. Seriously.“). How did this idea come to you?

Like most of my best ideas, I stole borrowed it.

When I worked for Bill, he occasionally would ask me to track down the particulars of old baseball stories that he’d come across in his research. Many of those stories, along with the fruits of my research, were published in the three editions (1990-1992) of The Baseball Book that Bill wrote while I was working for him. Among all the things I did for Bill, researching those stories was my favorite. It’s like putting together a puzzle: you have all these pieces and when you’re finished you’ve got a picture that makes some sort of sense. Anyway, for years I fantasized about doing a book of “tracers” (as Bill calls them), but it wasn’t until now that I actually found myself doing it. With Bill’s kind blessings.

OK, why would you put yourself in the position to smash the legends and dreams of so many baseball fans? What kind of man are you?

No, ha ha, just kidding about the smashing of legends part … as I mentioned in the intro it seems to me that you strike a really nice balance here of both SHARING the legend (there were quite a few in here I had never heard of such as the Bill Mazeroski legend and the one about Bob Feller throwing the fastest pitch ever to strike out Birdie Tebbetts). One of the really cool parts of this book for me was that I found myself ROOTING for the legend? You know what I mean? Did you find yourself doing that, rooting for the story to be right?

Oh, I wanted every story to check out perfectly. Because I quickly realized that very few of them would, and I wanted the reader to occasionally be surprised to discover the perfectly truthful story. Especially later in the process, the high point of my week would be checking a story and finding that it happened exactly as it was supposed to have.

Non-sports book you are reading right now? And how are you liking it?

I’m in the middle of a book by Jonathan Rosen, The Life of the Skies*, which is a literary take — almost (but not quite) too literary, at least for me — on bird-watching (or to use the proper term, “birding”). Rosen writes beautifully and does as well as anyone at articulating why we care so much about our birds.

*I love asking this question to interesting people, because it seems they’re always reading something completely whacked. They hardly ever say, “Oh yeah, I’m reading the latest John Grisham thing.” They instead tend to say, “Yeah, I’m reading the 1976 Chevy Chevelle Car Manual” or “I’m reading Beowulf again” or “I’m actually in the middle of a really interesting book on coal burning.” I mean, bird-watching? Really?

What band/performer would you consider yourself a world expert on?

None, anymore. When I was younger I was fairly obsessive about bands, and read everything I could find about REM and Elvis Costello. But that’s taking us back 15-20 years. Oh, and in the late ’90s I was crazy about all things Brian Wilson. Today, the closest I come to that is a real affection for everything that Jeff Tweedy does. Rock-wise, that is. Musically, most of favorites now are jazz musicians from the 1950s and ’60s, including Miles Davis and all the great Blue Note artists.

OK, the book: Not surprisingly, I really liked Bill’s essay at the beginning — it’s really one of my favorites. In it, he talks about the good (and, perhaps even more, the bad) the comes with our generation’s preoccupation with accuracy. He seems to think that perhaps we have lost something — a little color, a little humanity — by being overly accurate? Do you believe that?

I have to admit that I take a perverse pleasure in beginning the book with Bill’s essay, which may be interpreted as throwing everything that comes afterward — my hundreds of pages, I mean — into philosophical doubt. But I think Bill’s point is that we risk being factual at the expense of the other stuff. My personal opinion is that we can have it both ways, but that many of us just aren’t able to swing from both sides of the plate.

Well, since that is an overarching theme in this book — confirming and also challenging some of the great baseball legends — do you find yourself at all caught in the middle between loving these stories (as you obviously do) and also casting doubt on them?

Caught in the middle? Not really. I just hope that no one whose story I’ve deconstructed reads the book and is offended. I don’t know that I’ve ever said this before, but I’m absolutely terrified by the thought of hurting someone’s feelings. Unless the someone is a bad guy (at least in my mind).

Lets throw a couple out there to whet people’s appetites. You have one of my all-time favorite stories, one that features Johnny Bench and a pitcher Gerry Arrigo. I have to admit, since I am writing a book on the 1975 Reds and this story so describes Bench, that the first thing I did when I got the book was search for it. Why don’t you tell us the story briefly and, without giving anything away, how you set out to look at it.

Well, first I should mention that I’m a lousy storyteller. Maybe that’s why well-told stories appeal to me: I find the process so impressive that it’s practically magical, like an episode of The Office. But here’s the story in a nutshell … Bench, still very young, was tired of Arrigo’s poor efforts, particularly with his fastball. So to shame Arrigo into trying harder, Bench caught Arrigo’s next fastball bare-handed. It’s part of the legend of Johnny Bench, which — as I’m sure you’ll write about at length in your book — was HUGE in the early 1970s. I don’t think fans today have any idea how famous Bench was, in his prime. He was like a movie star, perhaps the handsomest, most eligible bachelor in America. I know people reading this won’t believe that, but it’s true. *

*It is true … I suspect there will be LOTS of Bench glamour in “The Machine.” But the whole paragraph is true, even the part about Rob being a lousy storyteller. I mean, come on, I love Rob — that’s how he tells the Gerry Arrigo story? Two sentences? Of course, I don’t think Rob is really a lousy storyteller at all, but I do think he’s an extremely blunt and unimpressed with BS, which is a big reason why the book works.

Anyway, according to Bench, in one of his books, this incident was the talk of the National League … So after the tracking down the games in which this might have happened, I scoured The Sporting News and couldn’t find a reference to anything between Bench and Arrigo. I re-scoured. Still nothing. But Bench was so specific, and his book came out just a few years after this would have happened. So this was one of the few stories in my book that I just sort of left hanging, because I just don’t know. Granted, I should have tried to reach Arrigo and ask him … but the thought of that conversation made me uncomfortable so I didn’t do it.

Bob Feller has three stories in the book — I think Feller might be one of the 10 most legendary players in baseball history, and I mean legendary in the most literal sense, as in players who have had legends told about them. Babe Ruth would, I think, be No. 1, followed perhaps by Dizzy Dean, Ty Cobb … who do you think would make up your Top 5 or 10?*

*Of course, Satchel Paige should be in here too, but I did not mention him in the original question.

I think you’ve got Dizzy Dean too high, unless you count all the stories told about his broadcasting. This is probably because Dean’s career was so short. There just wasn’t time to rack up that many stories. I’d say it’s Ruth, Cobb, Feller … Walter Johnson’s in there, just because of all the stories about his fastball. Honus Wagner shows up a lot. Rabbit Maranville probably wouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame without all the stories about him. Paul Waner used to be everyone’s go-to guy when they needed a story about a guy who could drink and hit.

From the 1960s, probably Mantle and Drysdale. Oh, and oddly enough, in the 1950s you couldn’t read an issue of Baseball Digest without finding at least one Birdie Tebbetts story. Same goes for an old umpire named Billy Evans. One thing that’s really interesting is how guys like Bench and Evans go from being household names to relative unknowns in the blink of an eye.

Kansas basketball … that’s it, no question, just Kansas basketball. Thoughts?

I’m terribly critical, just like any other neurotic fan. I thought they should have won every game, which is neither fair nor realistic. My latest take is that if Brandon Rush takes fewer than five bad shots they’re as good as anybody and maybe just a tick better.

Quick self-serving question: What are the best baseball books you’ve read? You don’t have to say Soul of Baseball, really, you don’t.

I used to like this question, before half my friends wrote baseball books. In all honesty, yours might have been the only one I read last year, cover to cover. I spent most of 2007 trying to hold down a full-time job — blogging’s not the cake job that column-writing is (heh heh) — and write this new book. So what little reading time I had went to other subjects.

You’ve written and talked many times about how much Bill James has affected your life. What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about Bill?

Easy: That he doesn’t appreciate the beauty and the poetry of the game.*

*Do not forget that Bill will be featured on 60 Minutes on Sunday. I’m a longtime fan of 60 Minutes, but I must admit I haven’t been especially impressed with the few snippets that they have shown to promote this segment. I realize that they are shooting for a wide audience — expecting most people not to love baseball — and they usually do a wonderful job with this (they did a piece on a young conductor a few weeks ago that I thought was great and I know zippo about orchestras and classical music). So I’m hopeful. But I watched the brief interview with Morley Safer on their Web Site and … well, let’s see how it goes.

OK, have to ask you a handful of quickie baseball questions … here we go.

Yankees or Red Sox?

Yankees by a nose.

Beckett or Verlander?

Verlander because I’m still worried about Beckett’s durability.

How many games do the Royals win?

76 because Billy Butler can rake.

Favorite city name for the Angels?

Orange County.

Does anyone pan out for the Twins in the Santana deal?

Nope. Maybe a decent major leaguer, but they didn’t get the future star they needed to get in a deal like that.

Carlos Beltran’s numbers for the Mets this year?

Solid. As usual. He’s the new Amos Otis.

Adam Dunn … does he finish the season in Cincinnati? What about Ken Griffey?

Yes on both.

Dave Eggers or Malcolm Gladwell?

Gladwell’s the Bill James of … something. Not sure exactly what. Behavior, I guess. Eggers is the … something of something. I respect his ethos, but I’m afraid I have to admit I’ve never actually read one of his novels. Maybe an essay or something somewhere.

Who has the better year, Josh Hamilton or Rick Ankiel?

Hamilton.

Colorado Rockies — below .500, average team, or playoff contender?

Those things aren’t mutually exclusive, as a .500 team in the West may still be in the hunt in early September. I suppose someone’s going to come out of the pack, but at the moment nobody looks like a good bet for more than 85 or 86 wins.

Seattle Mariners — below .500, average team, or playoff contender?

Below .500; I have the M’s as the most overrated team in the majors.

Your Final Four?

KU, North Carolina, UCLA and Texas (when I watch D.J. Augustin I can’t believe the Longhorns could ever lose a game).*

*To be fair to Rob, this Final Four was chosen before the Sweet 16 games — we had a communication failure which is why this is only getting posted now. So — he’s still looking pretty good.

One baseball player you really wish you could know more about.

Oh, that’s a tough one. So many biographies have been published in the last few years that if you don’t know a lot about a player it’s probably because you don’t want to. I guess I’d like to know more about Greg Maddux and Jamie Moyer. How their minds work. I know they’ve both been written about extensively, but I don’t feel like I’m in their heads yet. Also, Hilton Smith, who was a really, really interesting guy.*

*Totally agree on Hilton Smith. He was at one point such an obsession for me that I named the one dog I’ve ever had (allergies!) Hilton after him. I would still love to write that book someday … the problem is finding enough info. And convincing a publishing house that anyone would buy it.

And finally, your World Series pick.

I haven’t made it yet, but for the moment I’ll go with the Dodgers.