The weirdest thing in Mike Piazza’s book

Yes, I’m still reading it. Yes, I’m almost finished. Finally. And yes, I will be requesting extra hazard pay from my employers. Anyway, here’s Piazza’s take on Tom Glavine, his teammate with the Mets for a few years ...

At any rate, I certainly respected his professionalism, and for the most part we managed to get along well enough, I thought. He’s Catholic, and we often went to church together on the road. Frankly, I was a little surprised when Glavine later took a backhanded swipe at me in his book Home of the Brave, implying that he’d grown up with a lot less privilege than I had. I thought I’d gotten past all that.

Okay, so here’s the weird thing ... I cannot find any evidence that Tom Glavine ever did a book called Home of the Brave. Glavine did “write” a book called None But the Braves: A Pitcher, A Team, A Champion. I have it. But that was published not “later” but rather in 1996, seven years before Glavine joined the Mets and became Piazza’s teammate. There’s never been a baseball book called Home of the Brave, and it’s strange that nobody picked up on that before publication of Piazza’s book; I mean, if you’re going to criticize an ex-teammate -- and probably a fellow Hall of Famer someday -- you’d probably want to make sure you get something like that right.

Ah, but while checking Glavine’s literary oeuvre, I noticed that he plays a big role in John Feinstein’s book, Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember. I have it. The season is 2007, and the two pitchers are Glavine and Mike Mussina. Feinstein talked to Glavine quite a bit, and the book is indexed. Maybe this is where Glavine said that thing about Piazza.

Nope. By 2007, Piazza had been gone for a couple of years. The only mention of Piazza in the entire 525-page book comes in a brief aside about 2003, Glavine’s first season with the Mets: “Mike Piazza was aging and balking at moving from catcher to first base.”

That’s Feinstein, not Glavine.

So, one can only wonder. If you have any ideas, please let me know, as I keep notes on these things.