by Richard Booroojian, EEEEEE! Contributing Editor Wednesday,
September 20, 2000 "Could he really have existed, or was he
perhaps invented by Robert Louis Stevenson, along with the
Master of Ballantrae, Long John Silver and the good Dr. Jeckyll?
Hal Chase is remembered as a shining, leering pock-marked face,
pasted on a pitchdark soul; there is some evidence to say that
he appeared in the flesh, but I lean more toward the invention
theory." The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract Okay, so
this quote does not come from the book at hand, which is The
Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers From 1870 to Today
(Scribner, 1997). Still, it is one of many indelible images from
one of the better baseball books ever written, and that book in
turn is the first of three works that, taken together, provide
an absorbing, entertaining and thought-provoking retrospective
on baseball history. The above quote has stayed in my mind for
over a decade because before I read it, I had never heard of Hal
Chase, and yet Chase was