The Unofficial Guide to Baseball's Most Unusual Records

Bob Mackin's "The Unofficial Guide to Baseball's Most Unusual Records" is a reasonably entertaining book showcasing baseball's interest in all kinds of statistics - records, in this case. The book, in twenty chapters, is organized into groups of like records (i.e., pitchers, batters, home runs, etc.) and within each chapter are records of the mildly interesting (such as age of youngest player, age of oldest rookie) to those records that you probably will not find anywhere (earliest news conference to announce a retirement, for example, or the only ballplayer shot by a Lithuanian-speaking stalker). Like potato chips, cashews or nachos, these bite-sized bits of information are hard to put down. That said, the errors in the book tend to hit a wrong note when one is found when reading. While I usually tend to look past mistakes in books, reference and record books should be checked more closely to eliminate errors, so that others don't pass along faulty facts. But finding out that the first tie World Series game occurred in 1922 (not including 1907 or 1912, apparently) and errors on World Series opponents do cause one to look twice at the information, to make sure it's being read correctly.