Another Phony Memoir -- This One with Lawsuits?

Now this is just sad. As Americans, we have a right to expect a certain level of adroitness on the part of our phony memoir authors. But now it seems like they're not even trying to make their lies believable anymore.

Matt McCarthy is the newest member of the club, thanks to his book Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit. Educated at Yale and Harvard Medical School, you'd think McCarthy would be clever enough to embellish the yarns from his brief stint in low-level professional baseball only in ways that would be difficult to identify. Nope. According to The New York Times,

Statistics from that season, transaction listings and interviews with his former teammates indicate that many portions of the book are incorrect, embellished or impossible.... Several times in the book, which he devotes mostly to the antics of libidinous teammates and his manic manager, Tom Kotchman, McCarthy directly quotes people stating incorrect facts about their own lives and tells detailed (and mostly unflattering) stories about teammates who were in fact not on his team at the time.

Not only that -- McCarthy wasn't even smart enough to limit himself to lies that won't get him sued. Several of the disputed anecdotes are downright actionable. McCarthy accuses a teammate of admitting to faking an injury and trash-talking fans and Dominican players; depicts another cracking jokes about disabled children; and accuses his former manager, Kotchman, of urging steroids on players and ordering a pitcher to hit a batter. Say what you will about Herman Rosenblat, his fake story of finding love during the Holocaust didn't leave him open to a libel lawsuit. And with Odd Man Out at No. 29 on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list, McCarthy makes a juicy target for lawyers.

Of course, for now, the author is sticking to his script, insisting there were, at most, a "handful of details" he might've invented to fill in memory gaps. But we've all seen how this plays out. The publisher -- Viking, in this case -- will dig in for a couple days as pressure mounts; then it will flip, toss McCarthy overboard and apologize to all and sundry.