If I were representing Piazza and had his best interests in mind, I’d go over some of these stories and make sure they couldn’t backfire against him. But on the other hand, maybe more controversy leads to higher sales.

As for the larger question of the editors allowing faux facts into books, I have two answers. First, why fact-check something you KNOW to be true? The player just told you it happened; you KNOW it happened. I’ve actually worked fact-checking sports books for a children’s book publisher (they were team histories. I did all of MLB and half of the NBA books); I used the sports-reference pages, and verified everything I needed. It was easy and pretty fun. But for anecdotes, the checking is harder, and people often don’t know how to go about doing it. Second of all, and this is the post-modernist in me talking, is that, in a sense, the story with the incorrect “facts” is the truer story. At least, it’s the truer story to the person telling it. If you actually correct things, while you may be presenting facts, you are mis-representing the person’s memory. And in one’s own autobiography, one has a right to have one’s own memories represented. So I don’t really have a problem with it, although in an ideal world, I think one would fact-check and add it in a footnote or something. But that’s just my take.