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I recently finished reading Matt McCarthy's Odd Man Out. The book details McCarthy's one season in professional baseball that he spent with the Provo Angels after being taken in the 21st-round of the 2002 draft. I picked up the book because it had drawn comparisons to Ball Four and A False Spring. While McCarthy's book doesn't live up to either of those excellent books, I was entertained by it and wanted to share my thoughts on it.

The book however has generated some controversy thanks to a New York Times article by Alan Schwarz and Benjamin Hill in which they detail what they believe to be significant inaccuracies with the book. At first glance, many of them to seem to be of the trivial nature such as timeline issues. McCarthy has even acknowledged himself that in working from journals that were several years old that he made mistakes. He maintains though that the book's fundamental message is unchanged by the errors.

I'm not so sure. I felt one of the book's primary strengths was in McCarthy's willingness to engage members of the team from different backgrounds (which in his case as a Yale graduate was just about everyone). There is a scene in the book where McCarthy describes a conversation he had with a young Dominican pitcher who has been removed from a game for refusing to hit an opposing batter as retaliation. The scene stood in stark contrast to the hijinks that McCarthy attributed to many of his teammates throughout the book. But Schwarz and Hill were able to show that the earlier beanballs that McCarthy said were the motive for the retaliation order never occurred. Was McCarthy mistaken about the date or cause, or did he simply make the incident up?

Tom Kotchman was McCarthy's manager in Provo and is a source for many of the anecdotes that are related in the book. Kotchman has filed a 14-page response through his lawyer to the book's publisher in which he lists what he believes to be things that didn't happen. Several of McCarthy's teammates have also come forward with their own protests. A good deal of these objections were to be expected. When you share information with the world that happened when people didn't know they were "on the record," you're going to cause resentment.

So what does one make of the book at this point? As I mentioned above, I found the book to be a quick, enjoyable read. Those that follow baseball closely probably aren't going to discover much here that they didn't already know about the inner workings of minor league baseball, but McCarthy did a solid job with the human element of the story. He not only shares humorous anecdotes, but also lets us in on the thought process as he and several of his teammates struggle to reconcile their ability (of lack there of) with their dreams. As the book ended, I had the feeling that McCarthy still loved baseball despite how easy it would have been for him to have become jaded. The problem with all of the inaccuracies though is that now I'm left wondering how genuine he was throughout the book.