Thumbing through Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of DiMaggio the other day, looking to find his version of the goofy Lefty Gomez anecdote about DiMag trying to make people forget about Tris Speaker (which appears nowhere in the Cramer tome, by the way), I came across another anecdote that Gomez told about him and DiMaggio getting on manager Joe McCarthy’s nerves by laughing it up after a tough loss. That anecdote (pp. 122-3) begins with Gomez setting the scene:
"This one time I had pitched in Cleveland against Bobby Feller and I went thirteen innings and got beat 2-1…."
Being a thoroughgoing skeptic by this point, I decided to track down the 13-inning loss, Gomez vs. Feller, if only to see where in DiMaggio’s career it took place. After all, it had to be relatively early, since he and Gomez were teammates for only the first half of DiMaggio’s relatively short career. Let me cut straight to the chase and report that in the decade that Gomez, DiMaggio, Feller and McCarthy held the roles described here, 1936-1945, Gomez never pitched a 13-inning game, against Feller or anybody else. His peak in innings pitched during this decade was 10 and 1/3rd, on May 5th, 1939, which was indeed a 2-1 loss in Cleveland, but not to Bob Feller, who never appeared in this game. Feller, by the way, did pitch as many as 13 innings in a game, on August 7, 1941, but it was also in a loss, and to Detroit, not the Yankees.
In Cramer’s defense (his book is described on the cover as "meticulously researched"), this anecdote comes straight out of Maury Allen’s perhaps not so meticulously researched book Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?, opening the question as to how meticulous a researcher it takes to look up extraordinary claims such as a 13-inning performance.
Cramer’s indexer, by the way, is also somewhat less than meticulous, listing separately the two Yankee pitchers, Lefty Gomez and Vernon (Goofy) Gomez, interpolating a third Gomez between the two in that alphabetical string, one Tony Gomez. (And the first page-number the "Gomez, Tony" index refers to, page 40, is actually a reference to Goofy-Lefty-Vernon, not Tony Gomez.) I attribute this indexing error to a lack of familiarity with baseball—I can see how someone might come across the names Lefty Gomez and Goofy Gomez and conclude that they are two different Gomezes, just not someone who follows baseball even casually.
Anyway, I just wanted to discuss the larger issue of tracers while I found myself running some of these. The definitive work on tracers, apart from Bill’s work introducing the term in the Historical Abstract, is Rob Neyer’s fabulous Big Book of Baseball Legends, which is wall-to-wall tracers (and Rob also did some of the original tracing as Bill’s researcher). This is a great book, tracing some published tall tales, and extracting the truth and some huge whoppers by juxtaposing the tales with old box scores and contemporary game descriptions.
What impressed me most on this go-around was the remarkable tolerance that Neyer displays at all the wholesale lying that he explicates. (His term—the subtitle to the book is "The Truth, The Lies, and Everything Else.") Of course, in one sense, it’s only natural that he is grateful for the lies, and to the lying liars who tell these lies, because without them he wouldn’t have a subject for his book, but I’ve read a quote attributed to Albert Einstein to the effect that "Anger is man’s natural response to being lied to," and I wonder that Neyer (and James) are as cheerful and accepting of the lies as they seem to be. (That Einstein quotation, by the way, seems to be apocryphal as well—another lie, about lying. If Einstein ever said half of the wise remarks attributed to him, he’d never have had the time to do any serious math, and he’d probably top Abraham Lincoln in pithy quotes, except that most of what Lincoln is quoted as saying has also been mostly invented posthumously. Between Einstein, Lincoln, Mark Twain and Yogi Berra, they must have actually said something memorable some time, but damned if I can pick out the actual quotes from all the made-up ones any more. Between them, they’ve been credited with 75% of all the quotes ever made, another fictional statistic, and you can quote me on that.)
At any rate, on the final page of his text here, Neyer castigates a columnist, Phil Mushnick, for expressing anger at one of the many whoppers told by Joe Morgan over the air, a tall tale that that Neyer is himself, on that page, in the process of exposing:
Umm, okay, Phil. Funny thing, though. I thought old baseball players are supposed to spin the occasional tall tales. Don’t we love them for doing exactly that?
Anyway, when Mushnick contacted ESPN, a spokesman acknowledged the errors and said Morgan would issue a correction….Does Mushnick expect that every professional athlete who’s ever told a tall tale—at a banquet, or in a book, or while calling a game on the radio—to issue a retraction? I think it’s perfectly fair to check the veracity of stories for our own edification. But I’m not sure that we should hold ex-athletes to a higher standard than we do our elected officials. As Mudcat Grant says, "There ain’t no fun telling a boring story."
I don’t mean to get in between Mushnick and Neyer here (Neyer had worked for ESPN, and may have been irritated on behalf of the network whose employees Mushnick was holding to a high standard of accuracy) but that’s sort of where I find myself—in between the extremes of loving ex-athletes for the tall tales they spin and holding them to a higher standard than elected officials face.
That middle position is something like "irritation" and "disappointment" over the wholesale inaccuracies spun by ex-athletes, as well as puzzlement at either extreme position. I certainly don’t love ex-athletes for telling bogus stories at banquets (or in sworn testimony before Congress, for that matter), if only because those stories form the basis for our disputing the accuracy of other sources. In resolving some of the disputed parts of baseball history, some people like to rely on the testimony of eyewitnesses to certain deeds or events, and to use those accounts to cast doubt on later reporters’ alternative explanations, even when those later alternatives are more objectively based. (In discussing MVP voting, , for example, we often must enter into the thinking of contemporary viewers of ancient seasons in trying to make sense of votes that seem unsupported by statistics—some will find it dispositive that a player was described in print as "great" or "a leader" or "a guy whose contributions don’t show up in the box score.") So, yeah, I do want the anecdotes that players tell to have a germ of accuracy to them, or at least for them to be thoroughly debunked where they lack that germ—that’s why I think Neyer is doing such a terrific service here (and elsewhere) in pointing out the fictionalizing present in so many of these ex-athletes’ anecdotes.
As to the Mudcat Grant quote that ends Neyer’s critique of Phil Mushnick (it appears in Tales from the Tribe Dugout, p. 70, btw), I love telling non-boring stories, and I love making them up out of my imagination, but when I do, I usually take great care to label them clearly as "fiction." To peddle the nonsense my imagination comes up and to expect that some reader will mistake it for the truth strikes me as a near-criminal act, especially if it’s a story that took place in privacy where I was an active participant. Mudcat came up with the quotation, not out of any objective philosophizing about truth and accuracy but on the occasion of having been busted for telling some stories that didn’t check out. It’s because ballplayers are often the sole eyewitnesses to the events they describe ---Gomez’s story takes place on a train compartment he shared with DiMaggio, with Joe McCarthy overhearing their hilarity in that compartment--that we place so much credence on their version of their stories’ details, so when they prove to be fictionalizing, sometimes with close to zero basis in fact—well, I find that disappointing.
As to whether I want to hold them up to the standards I expect from elected officials: I’m not sure if I have ANY standards any more for elected officials telling anything resembling the truth, but surely this is not the only standard loftier than wholesale fictionalizing, is it? I’m reminded of Richard Nixon’s defense when accused of committing various crimes against the state. Nixon claimed "I am not a crook," overstating (or mis-stating) what the accusations were about in order to deny them. He wasn’t, strictly speaking, standing accused of being "a crook," in the sense that he was accused of committing robbery personally, or shoplifting, or any other petty crime we might associate "crooks" with, so by proclaiming his innocence on this vague term, he was exonerating himself on all possible criminal charges. It’s a sort of "Well, hey, I didn’t actually murder anyone myself" defense, pleading innocent to a crime you’re not charged with. That’s what Neyer does here, in this curious passage in a wonderful book, letting the ex-athletes off lightly by exonerating them of a crime, lying on important matters of state, that no one has accused them of. It’s a very petty crime that I’m accusing them of committing here, hardly a crime at all, in fact, just misleading people into believing their versions of stories they could plausibly have been first-hand witnesses to, which is why I love tracers so much, and the tracing tracers who trace them. Thanks, Rob, for your super-human tolerance and your super-generous acceptance of the athletes who provide you, and ultimately us, with these fascinating tracers.