Who Fact-Checks the Fact-Checkers?

Like an Alan Moore quote run amok (“Who watches the watchmen?”), fact-checking the fact-checkers came to mind this week when I submitted my most recent SABR biography for editing and fact-checking. This is my third bio for SABR, but I’ve fact-checked hundreds of biographies and game stories by other authors. Maybe thousands, I have no idea. It’s always a pleasure to submit my own work to the experts.

The newest bio subject is Jim Rittwage, a little known right-hander from Bedford Heights who appeared in eight games for Cleveland in 1970, starting three and winning one amazing game – a complete game six-hitter against the juggernaut Orioles, who went on to win 108 games and the World Series that season and featured some marquis baseball names (Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson, Boog Powell, Davey Johnson).

Rittwage is the first player I’ve written about who is still with us and, even better, he went to high school with my father at Bedford Heights and through some connections in the Bedford grapevine, I was able to interview Mr. Rittwage for the bio. He’ll turn 80 years old this fall, but it was a great chat and his memory was impeccable. The bio will be posted on the SABR site soon and linked here on my site as well.

The biography process is arduous. I think this one had over 40 endnotes and I have pages upon pages of notes from each year of his career and a first draft that went well beyond the 4,000 word cutoff.

I say this to emphasize that I’m going to stick with fact-checking for a while and focus my writing instead on fiction. I’ve had a few submissions rejected recently. That’s fine, it’s all part of the process, and I’m sure that those publications will shed tears of shame when my ship comes in. Maybe.

But I love the freedom of fiction and can’t wait to dive back into some projects that have been languishing (marinating? fermenting? forgotten?) in the meantime.

Instead of this: Rittwage threw a complete game in his first start of 1964, striking out five¹, before tweaking his knee on the bus ride to Altoona²…

I can just say this: the ship’s captain woke to find his catamaran surrounded by pirates, guns drawn and harpoons cocked, and did the only thing he could – activate his single-use force field and converted quickly to submarine mode, gliding silently under the baffled pirates and down into the Belize’s endless Blue Hole…

Fun. No fact-checking, just the limits of my own ridiculous imagination. So stay tuned, and hopefully some of that weirdness finds it’s way into the world at some point soon.

¹Russell Schneider, “Rittwage Brings Heat in Debut,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 10, 1964: 3-A.
²Don’t fact check these endnotes. This is also fiction. Historical fiction. Russell Schneider and, of course, the Plain Dealer are real, but there were no tweakings of knees in 1964.