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Matt McCarthy ’03

By the staff | 11:15am March 13 2009

Medical resident Matt McCarthy ’03 made quite a splash last month with his book Odd Man Out, a tell-all account of his year as a minor-league pitcher with the Provo Angels: an excerpt in Sports Illustrated, an interview in USA Today, and sightings on the New York Times Best Seller List (#21 as of March 8).

But when the New York Times published an article on March 3 pointing out that “many portions of the book are incorrect, embellished, or impossible,” McCarthy suddenly found his name in print alongside faux memoirists James Frey and Herman Rosenblat. McCarthy’s errors—many of them pointed out by McCarthy’s former manager and teammates, who were not happy with the way they were portrayed—do not seem to have sunk the book, though; publisher HarperCollins is standing behind the book, and it was still the third-best-selling baseball book on Amazon as of March 12.

“I trusted my notes and my memory on some smaller details, and there were obviously a few instances in which I didn’t have things quite right. That’s my fault, and I’ll take the blame,” McCarthy told USA Today on March 9. “But if people are waiting for me to break down and confess that I made everything up, it’s not going to happen.”

Filed under fraud, books, controversy, baseball
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