Baseball Imposters: The Dark Side of Fandom (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798995099529)

For most of us, the dream of playing big league baseball is a childhood fantasy that fades with time and ultimately dies when reality sets in. But for a select few, that dream morphs into an altered reality.

For over 40 years, author Rob Sheinkopf has collected stories of grown men who falsely claim to have played Major League Baseball.

In BASEBALL IMPOSTERS, Sheinkopf explores what author W.P. Kinsella called "The Eddie Scissons Syndrome," inspired by a character in his novel Shoeless Joe, the story behind the movie Field of Dreams. Though the syndrome is named after a fictional character, it is disturbingly real and widespread.

Sheinkopf's fascination with this practice of deception involving baseball goes back to 1985, when a "former major leaguer" who Sheinkopf interviewed turned out to be an imposter-someone whose false representation of his past was both puzzling and unsettling. This discovery sparked Sheinkopf's curiosity about why individuals engage in such deception and led him to recognize how widespread and common the practice is.

These stories will surprise, amuse, and in some cases, remind readers of deceptions told to them by their colleagues, teachers, neighbors, or even family members... stories that, upon closer inspection, reveal such deception.

BASEBALL IMPOSTERS offers a compelling, entertaining, and eye-opening look into a peculiar and persistent phenomenon that extends beyond baseball into the human experience.

"Many of us wanted to be ballplayers at some time in our youth, but these guys took that aspiration and transformed it into a very different kind of fantasy baseball." -Steve Gietschier, author, Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years