As far as his duty goes, well, there is a whole lot of business in publishing that all leads back to the bottom line, money. Did his publisher want to wait another year or just go live with a puff piece. I am sure there were discussions and Joe Posanski was involved and ultimately signed off.

Not exactly guardians of high standards.

I guess the people here on HBT simply do not know enough about the situation to go against Joe Pos because they only know him from his excellent work and not from the garbage book he put out about Paterno.

I get your opinion, you think its not a fair portrait of Paterno. Fine. But that’s not your call, its the call of the author and publisher. I suppose the question was from their point of view, do we wait another year or two, continue to fund it, or do we print it as we have it now?

There are a lot of books that I think are dumb because the author missed a key fact/angle. Just makes it a bad book, I don’t have to read or buy.

1) To honor the players of the 19th century. They have done this rather well. Among first basemen, they elected Cap Anson, Roger Connor, and Dan Brouthers. You or I may think that Cap Anson was a pig of a person, but all three of these were fine baseball players.
2) To honor players the BBWAA missed for some reason. Players who are above the standards for BBWAA selections but were not selected by them for some reason. Johnny Mize fits in here. So does Ron Santo. Let’s hope they get to Lou Whitaker and Bobby Grich while they’re still on the sunny of the turf.
3) To honor players the BBWAA missed because they didn’t meet the BBWAA standards. Highpockets Kelly, Sunny Jim Bottomley, Orlando Cepeda, and Jake Beckley fit in here. I don’t much see the point.
4) To honor managers, executives, umpires and such. Frank Chance goes here. Below the standards for a player but with two World Series wins and two other pennants as a manager. A similar resume didn’t work for Gil Hodges; I think it should for Joe Torre.
5) To honor Negro League players. What little I know about the Negro Leagues could fit in a thimble and have room left over for about a dozen carraway seeds, so I won’t comment.

If you want to read investigative reporting of the Paterno/Penn State crimes, check out Mark Scolforo. Investigative reporting is what he does and he does it well.

1. Baseball Reference Wins Above Replacement (WAR) — This is to measure career value. Obviously, many people have their issues with WAR — and many of their criticisms are fair — but my point is I just wanted a consistent standard. It could have been Fangraphs WAR, Win Shares, Baseball Prospectus VORP, OPS+/ERA+ … but I think WAR is sensible enough, plus it is the easiest stat to search.

2. Baseball Reference WAR/7 — This is the players’ Top 7 WAR seasons added together — this is to measure how good a player was at his peak.

While not explicitly stated, this is a rough measure. Nobody is going to be drawing any conclusions because a guy’s WAR/7 was 0.3 below the median, and there’s always room for reasoned arguments for where WAR fails (particularly on defense).

If Posnanski had come out and said something like, “I was very close with Paterno, and I feel I understand his point of view, and I’m going to document that,” then that would have been more honest (though more controversial and probably bad for book sales.) Of course, that’s not what Posnanski did, and he’s going to have to live with the fact that he lost a lot of fans/credibility as a result.

There were plenty of other sources for facts about Paterno’s roll. I think the facts just make Posnanski’s book irrelevant, but I can’t condemn him for chosing not to make the book about Paterno’s roll in a horrible situation.