Eldon Ham's new book Larceny and Old Leather is an amusing collections of stories about how baseball players, owners and teams often bend the rules or outright break them. He covers field manipulation, gambling, curses racism, sign stealing and any other mischief that is part of the lore of the game.

The book, however, should be read more as entertainment than fact. In the second paragraph of the first chapter, Ham makes an egregious error, putting Babe Ruth's record setting 59 home runs in 1923 instead of 1921. He also repeats the story about the Black Sox name coming from the White Sox uniforms being dirty, which doesn't appear to be true. This leads me to believe the book is poorly researched.

Ham drops the ball in other areas as well. I was looking forward to the chapter titled Hal Chase: Malignant Genius. Chase is one of the darkest characters in the history of baseball. He could have been the model for Senator/Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars, down to the disfigured face. But Ham doesn't explore the character of Chase, nor the reasons for the appellation above; he just attributes it to a judge.

Ham is a good story teller, but I'd like more substance. I'd also like to know that he did more than repeat embellished stories, that he actually checked the sources. It appears that didn't happen.