Errors Cast Doubt on Matt McCarthy’s Baseball Memoir

I noticed this error while reading it:

In several instances, McCarthy recalls unflattering behavior by teammates who were not on the Provo roster at the time. The left-hander Joe Saunders, generally depicted as a spoiled bonus baby, on Page 218 is described on the team bus making fun of disabled children. In fact, the book correctly says that Saunders had been promoted off the club days before.

I flipped the pages back to make sure I didn't miss Saunders coming back. If I caught that on first glance, someone should've during the vetting process. However the inaccuracies listed in the article seem like honest, lazy mistakes. Like the guy who punched in the balls by Larry King's kid who wasn't called up yet, he could've just called him "one of my teammates" if he wasn't positive it was a certain guy.

The guy talking about missing his kid (who wasn't born yet) seems a little ticky-tack as well. A lot of people would say that if their wife is pregnant.

Whoever said they shouldn't have called this a memoir is right. Find me a memoir that every fully checks out. All of them have these types of errors.

 

Also, does anyone else find it weird that the Times devoted two stories to debunking this book? I mean it was newsworthy and it's popular and all, but just a little odd.

 

It still boggles my mind that in this Internet society, where everything can be checked and verified, that people still try to pass off false information and fact and think they can get away with it.

 

The Jayson Blair backlash. It can happen to anyone!

 

Yeah, that's what I was thinking as I went through their blow-by-blow, very reminiscent of Blair's treatment, except 75 pct of McCarthy's mistakes are dates and minor details that could've been excised from his story with no problem. And yes, with all the dates and call-ups easily available online, I don't know why someone didn't use that to verify the info.

 

Because there is no verification step in the book publishing process. Every book contract warrants that you take complete responsibility for your content, and you're responsible if there is legal action against you.

There can be a lengthy legal vetting, but no one is going to fact-check the basic manuscript. They can order you to remove certain content if they don't feel you can support it, but that's usually reserved for obvious libel and unsubstantiated accusations that could bring legal action.

 

On journalistically-related note, situations like this exemplify why I am so uncomfortable with "narrative" journalism in its strictest form. People remember shit different. If I had a dollar for every time a player or coach told me a story that, after fact-checking, could not possibly have been 100 percent true, I wouldn't need to be in this business.

If people can't even write a memoir about their own life without fucking it up, what are the chances a third party can accurately write about an event in someone else's life as if they were actually there?

 

I'm working on a book right now. A book, not a memoir. A book that requires interviewing a lot of former players. They screw up basic facts constantly. Constantly. Not maliciously. It's just how they remember it. Some of them even tell the same false funny stories, because that's kind of how oral history works.

It's mostly minor stuff - a player swearing a down and distance was one thing when I'd just watched the game and it was another. But in sports, details are so easy to check, you have to do it. If you don't, the modern reader will gleefully do it for you.

If I remember right, David Maraniss, a tremendous researcher, had some errors in "Clemente" that sabermetric bloggers, already irritated because Maraniss dared write a passage about how Clemente's "greatness could not be summarized by mere statistics" (something like that), jumped all over.

I think, God rest his soul, David Halberstam introduced more than a few errors into his book by trusting the memories of aging ballplayers.

You have to be careful in this day and age. People love to poke holes in other people's work, and they have the means to do it. Ask Bobby Jindal.

 

If there were no factual errors in the SI excerpt, how would the magazine be to blame? They can't be expected to fact-check the entire book. And I haven't seen anything to suggest SI knew there were questions of veracity with the book and ignored them.

 

This is a really good point. I come up on this all the time, doing "anniversary" type stories; i'm sure most of us have. If you talk to three people who were involved in something that happened 30 or 40 years ago, you'll get three different scenarios, most often, sometimes in different cities, along with different accounts of who was responsible for X happening, who coined a catchphrase, etc.
You really have to go back and see what was written at the time.
If it's your minor league baseball career, you wouldn't think you'd have to do that, but you should.

 

I remember Halberstam thanking a fact-checker in his Jordan book from preventing a major factual error at the 11th hour. That always stuck out to me how anyone can make major mistakes.

In McCarthy's post-script he says any mistakes should be blamed on him and his memory. For those of us who actually read the book, who here thought these mistakes ruined it for them?

The only one that the Times found that really bothers me, off the top of my head, is the story about him and Brown getting drunk before the long road trip, when Brown wasn't on the team. Makes me wonder if he remembered who that guy was sometimes.