For a biography of one of the most enduringly controversial figures in the game, this is a real chore to get through, for two reasons: 1) too much background/historical context, that does not add to the reader’s perspective; and 2) too much disingenuous defense of Chase himself.   I am not inclined to side with authors who open by announcing that Bill James is wrong in his assessment of a given baseball figure, frankly, but if the contention is that Chase was a product both of his time and of the game at that time, okay, I’ll see what you come up with.   But they just core-dump all this Americana and stories of other fixes, and they don’t disprove anything, really; yeah, I guess they prove Chase wasn’t involved in the Black Sox fix, but…I wasn’t under the impression that anyone thought he was.   Everyone thinks he knew about it and did nothing to stop it (which the authors admit is true); he was allegedly involved in dozens of other fixes, and notorious for “lying down,” a charge which they address by more or less saying that, well, Christy Mathewson was no saint either, and just because Chase took money and then made four errors doesn’t prove anything.   Uh…okay.   But one of them was called “the Christian Gentleman,” and it wasn’t Chase, and anyway, the book isn’t about Big Six and whether he should have played bridge for money.   After Chase leaves baseball, it gets moderately more entertaining, because it’s stuff I didn’t know before, but overall, it’s a frustrating book which I had to force myself to finish.   (1/16/05)

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