I love tracers, love reading about them, love doing them, but this is one of the things that my brother, and Bill sometimes, inveighs against, for slightly different reasons.  My brother belongs to the "Who gives a crap if someone got a small detail wrong in a book one time? Jeez, get a life, wouldya?" school of criticism, while Bill’s perspective, as I understand it, is to be forbearing and forgiving of those writers of an earlier age who tended to spin glamorous, glorious, inspiring tales of derring-do that occasionally get the dates, players, scores, homefields, etc. slightly off in the course of creating entertaining legends.

Me, I get a little bit deranged whenever a writer describes some event inaccurately.  I worked (briefly and without particular distinction) as a journalist, and later taught some college courses in journalism:  "ACCURACY" was tattooed on my forehead at the first gig and then emblazoned across my chest in red ink at the second one. Well, it felt like that, anyway.  It just isn’t that hard to get the story straight, and readers kind of appreciate it when you do take that trouble, so young reporters are cautioned against taking liberties and shortcuts with the facts. Bill, though, seems much more amused than angered by legend-spinners like Bill Stern, who basically embellished anecdotes to the point of complete and laughable unrecognizability. Woody Allen mocked this trait of Stern in "Radio Days," you may recall.  I grew up reading Stern, and was disappointed to learn that most of the stories I had committed to memory as a lad were just that, stories, bearing little resemblance to what had actually transpired.  But Bill (James, not Stern) did publish the first "Tracers" I ever read, and they ranked very high on my list of features I was delighted by in Bill’s early work, so I know he’s not above juxtaposing the facts and the whoppers for our amusement and delectation, either. I hope you enjoy them, because I’ve got a few more for you here.

As mentioned in one of my Eddie Gaedel pieces, the author of both the Gaedel episode and the best written account of that episode, is Bill Veeck.  I can’t recommend his autobiography, Veeck as in Wreck, highly enough—I loved it as a boy, quite a few years back, so while researching the Gaedel pieces, I picked it up again, this time thoroughly suspicious of any fact ever transcribed by any writer. Armed now with baseball-reference.com’s box scores and (sometimes) play-by-play accounts, I decided to inspect some of the colorful stories Veeck tells of particular games, plays, seasons. As you may expect, the first few I examined were a little light on facticity, but I still love Veeck’s writing anyway-- the scamp, the rogue, the charming raconteur.  Let’s just classify VAIW under "non-non-fiction," though.

On page 20 of my tattered NAL paperback (the same copy I read some 50 years ago, the front and back covers long-disintegrated, as well as the end-papers, leaving me with a yellowing, disheveled mess) Veeck writes this passage, about his first baseball gig, working for his dad’s Chicago Cubs:

"Late in the season, we were playing the Giants to break a tie for first place. The Giants seemed to have the game sewed up right up until the ninth inning when the Cubs scored four runs to tie it up. The Giants scored four runs in their half of the tenth. In our half, the first two batters went out. Mark Koenig kept us alive with a home run. The next three batters got on to load the bases. Up came Kiki Cuyler, representing the winning run. And Cuyler belted one."

Let’s examine the passage closely:

"Late in the season"  (Okay, Veeck is in trouble right off the bat. A few lines earlier, he had specified that "the Cubs were in another hot race with the Giants that season. It was the year we finally won our first pennant"—which makes it 1929.  Since Veeck was born in 1914, and his dad became the team president in 1919, we’ll assume "our first pennant" is the 1929 one. (The Cubs did win one in 1918, but I doubt that the four-year-old Veeck was a big fan yet.)  A huge problem with 1929, though, is that Mark Koenig didn’t become a Cub until 1932, when the Cubs also won a pennant. Veeck is obviously mixing up the 1929 and 1932 pennant drives.  The events most similar to Veeck’s description here happened on August 31, 1932—I guess that’s late enough to qualify as late in the season—but there are some significant differences there too, which I’ll get to in a moment.)

"we were playing the Giants to break a tie for first place"  (In 1929, the Cubs led the NL by 5 games at the end of July, gradually increasing their lead as high as 14 and ½  games, so there is no point "late in the season" that they were tied with the Giants, or anyone, for first place. In the 1932 pennant race, which conforms best to Veeck’s account, the Cubs led the second-place Pirates by 7 and ½ on August 31. The way that sentence is constructed, you’re forgiven if you thought the Giants and the Cubs were tied for first place. There is no point anything like "late in the season" in either 1929 or 1932 when the Cubs were tied for first place with anyone—this sentence seems purely delusional or fantastical on Veeck’s part.)

"The Giants seemed to have the game sewed up right up until the ninth inning"  (Well, the Giants were leading the whole game, but after the 3^rd inning never led by more than two runs—the score was 5-4, Giants, going into the ninth, hardly what I’d call sewed up, especially in Wrigley.)

"when the Cubs scored four runs to tie it up." (Uh, no. The Cubs scored one run in the 9th to tie it up.)

"The Giants scored four runs in their half of the tenth." (This is accurate.)

"In our half, the first two batters went out."  (BBref.com doesn’t supply a play-by-play for this game, so this seems possible BUT:)

"Mark Koenig kept us alive with a home run." (BBref.com credits Koenig with 2 RBIs on this homerun, so obviously the bases were not empty, and therefore the first two batters couldn’t have made outs. It would be possible that three batters preceded Koenig in the inning and one of them got on base and two of them made outs, BUT:)

"The next three batters got on to load the bases." (There were three batters between Koenig, batting 8^th, and Kiki Cuyler, batting 3^rd, but one of them had to have made an out, BECAUSE:)

"Up came Kiki Cuyler, representing the winning run. And Cuyler belted one." (He did, and won the game, but since the Cubs won 10-9, and Koenig had hit a two-run homer, that score means that Cuyler’s HR was a 3-run HR, not the grand slam Veeck describes. BBref confirms this by listing it as a 3-run HR in Cuyler’s HR log. By the way, it was Cuyler’s 100^th HR, which Veeck doesn’t mention, probably because this was decades before we started taking notice the hundredth time anyone does anything in MLB--"That was Alvaro Espinoza’s one-hundredth hawked loogie into his glove, folks. They’re going to delay the game a moment to take photos." Probably no one noticed. This may be the first time anyone has ever mentioned it, for all I know. Cuyler also hit exactly 100 HRs against right-handed pitchers in his career.) Anyway, Veeck goes on to describe all sorts of fabulous events in the stands celebrating Cuyler’s exciting blow, but since I have no boxscore to compare that part of the account to, we’ll just assume all of those celebratory heroics are rendered with piercing accuracy.

I wasn’t sure why, exactly, I liked Veeck’s autobiography so much, but this time around, I found a few concrete reasons. For such a garrulous fellow, he’s remarkably reticent about praising himself. His ballclubs, yes. His business partners, sure. His dad, my gosh yes. His players, mentors, friends, wives, ex-wives, allies—he gushes praise on them more indiscrimately than a Harlem fire hydrant wrenched opened on a hot July morning. He even finds words of admiration, from time to time, for some of the shadier team-owners who swindled him. But he leaves out about 99.9% of the story about leaving the minor-league Milwaukee Brewers in 1943 to join the Marines, and devotes about half of one subordinate clause to his getting wounded in the Pacific and spending most of the war in a hospital.  His leg was operated on 36 times, eventually getting amputated below the right knee, but I had to read Veeck’s SABR bio to learn what happened to him, exactly.  (An anti-aircraft gun’s recoil, on the island of Bougainville, basically destroyed his lower leg.) Now, if I had had 36 headaches or 36 paper-cuts, you can rest assured I’d find several pages, if not several chapters, in my autobiography to recount my suffering but from Veeck? Not a word. You’ve got to admire that. His empathy for Negro League players, badly injured athletes, and people struggling against all sorts of incredible obstacles is worthy of anyone’s admiration. One of the few baseball people he expresses disapproval of, briefly, is Max Patkin, the baseball clown you remember from Bull Durham,  who occasionally gyrated in vulgar ways that struck Veeck as bordering on the obscene—but his description of Patkin’s schtick is one of the liveliest and most enjoyable passages in the book.

Anyway, now that that I’m done, for the time, heaping accolades on Veeck, let’s examine another of his whoppers:

"Mickey [Mantle] hit one out of Sportsman’s Park right-handed to beat us in a night game. When he went to the plate the next night against Satch, he was naturally swinging left-handed. This time Mickey hit a screaming line drive to the centerfielder." The point of the anecdote, on p. 195, is that Satchel Paige mistook the young switch-hitting Mantle for two entirely different batters.

So I looked first for a game in which Mantle, batting left-handed against the right-handed Paige in St. Louis, "hit a screaming line-drive to the centerfielder." Veeck doesn’t say whether this line-drive was a hit or an out, so anything that fits the general description would count. Then, after I found that game, I figured, I would see whether the previous night, Mantle had hit a right-handed home run. So I found eight games the Yankees played in St. Louis in 1951, 1952, and 1953, Paige’s only seasons pitching for the Browns:

In 1951, the Browns played the Yankees twice in Sportsman’s Park when Paige got into the game. The first game, July 22, Mantle didn’t play. The second game, August 29, Mantle batted twice against Paige, getting on via an error by the third-baseman and homering.

In 1952, the Browns played the Yankees three times in Sportsman’s Park when Paige got into the game. Paige did not face Mantle in his one inning on June 25^th.  On August 3^rd, Mantle hit an RBI single against Paige. On September 10^th, Mantle didn’t face Paige.

In 1953, the Browns played the Yankees twice in Sportsman’s Park when Paige got into the game. On June 7^th, Paige faced four batters, none of them Mantle. On July 16^th, Paige faced five batters, none of them Mantle. (In both of these short stints in 1953, btw, Berra homered off Paige.)

That’s a grand total of three plate appearances in Sportsman’s Park, for a single, a home run, and an error.  The only possibility of "a screaming line-drive to the centerfielder" would seem to be the RBI single, though why Veeck left out those details about the screaming line-drive, I cannot say. (A "line-drive to" any fielder would seem to describe an out, though you could argue, I guess, that this could also describe the direction of a hit.)   The impressive details about how Mantle blasted balls off the Browns’ pitchers in these two at-bats are the whole point of the story, and I’m more impressed by a hit and an RBI than I am by a ball hit, however hard, towards a particular fielder’s glove. In any event, assuming that this single matches the screaming line-drive, there are still some problems: the August 3, 1952 game was the second game of a double-header, meaning that it wasn’t a night game. Okay, maybe Veeck fudged that detail, and maybe his story doesn’t actually say in so many words that these two Mantle shots were in consecutive games,  just consecutive days, so let’s look at the previous night’s game to see if Mantle hit a right-handed home run to beat the Browns.

Uh, no. The Browns won. It was a day game. Mantle went homerless. So as far as I can tell, Veeck’s account doesn’t even give us an occasion to fact-check him. It simply never happened, at least not in the form he tells it.

Tracers are fun, and while Bill might not have the full-sized cow that I have in noting them (his is more like a cute little wobbly calf, I think), they are a little scary if you start assuming that baseball anecdotes bear a very close relationship to what happened. Maybe "baseball stories," for some people, bear an inherent disclaimer, in a microscopic font, warning that "Of course, in reading any anecdote about sports, you need to treat any facts herein with extreme suspicion." For another example, Bill recently reflected that maybe he was too harsh in quibbling with David Halberstam’s Summer of ’41, though I’m still resentful of Halberstam’s sloppiness in writing about baseball, not because I think it is essential that all sports-writing be rigorously fact-checked (though I do think that’s a virtue) but because I’d like to think that when Halberstam is writing about something more serious, like the Vietnam War, his facts can be relied on across the board, that I don’t need to cross-check whether General Westmoreland really said what Halberstam quotes him as saying.  But now that I see how unreliable his baseball stories are, I do feel the need to fact-check his non-baseball stuff, and there’s no convenient vietnam-reference.com.

And, likewise, my serious complaint about the fact-challenged stories Veeck tells is that, they cast doubt on every larger issue Veeck discusses, such as the account he gives of his valiant attempt to integrate baseball some years prior to 1947. His version of his effort to buy the Phillies, and introduce Negro stars, but being thwarted by the racist baseball establishment is, perhaps necessarily, light on provable details—necessarily, because much of the account rests on private conversations and closed-door meetings with people  who would want to deny what they said and did. But if Veeck were reliable on the things that can checked through boxscores and other objective measures, it would be easier to believe that Veeck’s accounts across the board are reliable, which I wish I could do.

But now my presumption is that he just made up some stuff about out-Branching Branch Rickey. (Who, by the way, is one of the several swindling baseball executives Veeck goes out of his way to find virtues in.) Or, if he didn’t invent it out of whole cloth, more likely he exaggerated his plan and his desire, and maybe a few opening forays into buying the Phillies, into actually nearly doing so. No one has been able to find much evidence for Veeck making this attempt, anyway.

He emerges from this book as a pretty good baseball man, though much of the book is devoted to explaining the complicated business maneuvers that a relatively poor man has to pull off to buy control in a baseball club, even in the relatively low-cost period of the first part of the twentieth century. (Veeck’s early attempts to raise a sum sufficient to buy a ballclub are, in terms of dollars and cents, about what you’d need to raise today to put a down payment on a mid-sized car.)  But his entire business plan, the parts I can make sense of, anyway, rests on his baseball know-how, because his plan seems to be 1) borrow money , 2) buy good ballplayers cheap, and play them regularly,  3) sell your ballplayers for sky-high prices to better organizations, 4) pay back the lenders or investors you borrowed from, and  5) start the whole process again.

If it were this easy, of course, you or I or any pauper could do the same thing—Veeck’s rare talent is knowing which ballplayers could really play ball, or more specifically, knowing which executives to hire who understand horse-flesh.  He rather charmingly explains his apprenticeship, starting as a ticket-taker, enabling him to evaluate everyone who worked for his organization, because he eventually understood how to do every job: answering phones, selling concessions, scheduling hotel rooms, and most of all, promoting his product.  Which is to say, for a baseball book, descriptions of particular games are surprisingly rare.

Let’s look at one more, in search of what actually happened:

Veeck gives an account of a famous game, the one in which he distributed thousands of placards ( saying "YES" and "NO" and several other options) to fans he designated as Grandstand Managers, and they would be asked to hold up these placards in response to questions like "Should we warm up a new pitcher now?" and "Infield in here?". Among the details I learned here, re-learned, I suppose, was that this game was just a few days after the Gaedel game, and the Gaedel game came only a few weeks after Veeck had bought the Browns, so he really was promoting the heck out of his team from the get-go. Still, I was a little disheartened to learn that this game, which had to be publicized well in advance (Veeck needed to place an ad in the local paper asking fans to vote on a starting lineup), drew a measly crowd of 3,925. (The Gaedel game’s crowd was much better, 18,369, no doubt because it was a Sunday doubleheader, and the Grandstand Manager game was the next Friday night.)

Anyway, long story short, Veeck’s account (p. 227) describes every move the Grandstand Managers made, and the results, and he got only one detail wrong: he says that the fans selected backup catcher Sherman Lollar to start the game, and that "Lollar collected three of our nine hits, scored three runs and drove in three," all of which is true except the last—Lollar had two RBIs, not three.

It’s a slightly better story if Lollar, the Peeple’s Cherce, drove in three, of course-- I don’t doubt that in all of these overly dramatic anecdotes, the mistakes are almost always in the direction of more drama, not less.  Note that in the example of the early Cubs’ pennant race, every muffed detail—the time of the season, the tightness of the pennant race, the walk-off grandslam—makes the drama greater, not lesser. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.  As Bill said (March 3, 2012 "Ask Bill" column) when someone asked him about an anecdote that Ed Konetchy had messed up, "Oh, I’m sure he was trying to tell the truth. People just mix up details in their memory, that’s all. We all conflate our memories every day without realizing we are doing it" with which I agree. I just think that messing up a story you’re recalling on the spot, without notes, speaking extemporaneously, is just a little different from a story you’re writing in a book that, like Veeck as in Wreck, might be read for a long time after it’s been published, and that innocent readers might assume to be reliable.  After all, Veeck was there, and I wasn’t even born yet in 1951 (my folks were trying their best, I’m sure), so who am I to say I have it right, and he has it wrong?

And of course an argument can be made, and should be made, that Veeck isn’t responsible for the mis-checked facts in his autobiography—his co-author is. Well, any author such as Veeck is always going to be held responsible,  but really it’s the co-author’s job to make sure that chapter 2 and chapter 3 add up to chapter 5. As anyone who’s ghostwritten, or co-written, a book knows, most non-authors who want to tell their stories are totally clueless as to literary construction, transitional sentences, dangling participles and the other niceties of, you know, writing anything, so mostly depending on how much money they’re offering, they have to hire a ghost-writer (for $$$$) or a co-author (usually $$ or maybe $$$, but more glory). Among the duties of such an assistant is checking the facts—I wouldn’t expect Bill Veeck to sit up late at night poring over old newspapers to see if Lollar got two hits or three. He would trust his memory. His co-author, in this case a very capable fellow named Ed Linn, would track down every fact out of Veeck’s mouth to see that they add up.

I know Linn was very capable, by the by, because I’ve read some of his other work, including Leo Durocher’s (co-written)  book Nice Guys Finish Last, about which Bill has written that "the use of language is astonishingly good, the pace is right, and all the details are in place. There are no gaps; the book follows a complex, tumultuous life year by year and day by day, giving both a sense of the time and a sense of the event." This could also describe Veeck as in Wreck (which, surprisingly, Bill did not describe in the first Historical Abstract, where I found that passage on Nice Guys Finish Last.) I will have to find my copy of Nice Guys… to see if the same sorts of errors appear there: it’s on my to-do list.

So in Veeck’s three descriptions of games I found, all contained some large or small detail misconstrued, teaching a lesson I wish I’d learned better and earlier: caveat lector.  Or translated into English: Dick Hannibal.