It Took a While, but They Finally Threw Book at Him

Editors of “The Baseball Encyclopedia” painstakingly check their facts, according to Bernie Miklasz of the St. Louis-Post Dispatch.

For example, the book for years contained the record of one Lou Proctor, who played one game for the St. Louis Browns, coming to the plate once and drawing a walk. No other information on him was available.

“We finally discovered that Lou Proctor was not a ballplayer at all but an employee of the Western Union company,” said Rick Wolff, senior editor of sports books for Macmillan, which publishes the encyclopedia. “He used to sit in the press box in St. Louis and transmit the box scores to the rest of the country. One day, he put himself in the box score.

“Nice try. He had us fooled for a long time, but we finally took him out of there.”