Deflating the tall tales of baseball
''Shut up, Tim McCarver." That's what Howard Bloom and Michael Kun say whenever they hear the Fox-TV baseball announcer serve up dubious pronouncements like ''a walk is as good as a home run."
Lifelong baseball fanatics, the men also get annoyed by broadcasters and sportswriters who repeat claims that former Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919 to finance the Broadway musical ''No, No Nanette" (he didn't) or by uninformed fans who insist that a tie goes to the runner (it doesn't).
''People have heard these things so many times, they think they're true," said Kun, a novelist and lawyer in Los Angeles who grew up a Sox fan in Barrington, R.I.
Fed up, Kun persuaded close baseball pal Bloom, a Needham lawyer, to help him write ''The Baseball Uncyclopedia," a book that blows up myths, fallacies, and tall tales that get passed down from one generation of fans to another.
''Some of these things are hard-core myths and the others are myths because we say they're myths," said Bloom with a chuckle.
Due out next month from Ohio-based publisher Emmis Books, the ''Uncyclopedia" is a nearly 300-page satirical, sometimes salty, take on baseball trivia. It sets the record straight on important issues, such as how the Baby Ruth candy bar got its name. According to Bloom and Kun, it was not named for President Grover Cleveland's daughter, as legend has it, but instead that rumor was a sneaky way for the candy company to avoid paying royalties to the Babe and a ruse the company used in court to successfully block him from putting out his own confection.
The book also tries to settle such burning debates as:
Which team had the ugliest uniforms ever? (No, not the Houston Astros with their orange-rainbow shirts, and not the
Did former Red Sox manager Don Zimmer have a metal plate put into his head after being hit by a fastball in 1953? (No, he didn't.)
Could you outperform the worst player ever to play in the major leagues? (Nope; even with a career batting average of .000, Baltimore's Drungo Hazewood -- who spent just two weeks in the majors -- was still better than you.)
During his research, Bloom was surprised to learn there were two versions of ''Take Me Out to the Ballgame," and that the 1908 original actually starts out, ''Katie Casey was baseball mad/Had the fever and had it bad." The words that most ballpark patrons sing during the seventh-inning stretch are really part of the song's chorus, he said.
Bloom, 54, grew up in Medford and was a lifelong Red Sox fan until he decided that the Anaheim Angels might be a good team to follow, too. So, midway through the 2004 season, when the Sox were faltering at nearly 10 games back, Bloom started rooting for the Angels, Kun's adopted local team.
''I thought they'd never see a Red Sox World Series, and I thought I was the reason," said Bloom, who showed up at Fenway for Game 2 of the World Series that fall wearing his Angels gear.
He claims, however, that while ''outwardly" an Angels fan, ''inwardly" he was still rooting for the Sox.
One the biggest canards the book attempts to deflate is the sentimental idea that baseball is some kind of metaphor for life.
''Please stop it. Really," Kun writes. ''It does not now represent, nor has it ever, represented the human experience. At least not any more so than hockey, pop music, backgammon, or high school French class."
Kun said the book's jocular tone is simply a reflection of the authors' belief that baseball is just dumb fun, not a matter of life or death, as so many Red Sox and Yankees fans sometimes believe.
''I always found it maddening how seriously people took baseball, how we give more meaning to these games than many of the players do," said Kun.
Christina Pazzanese can be reached at cpazzanese@globe.com. 
