If you know anything at all about Buck O’Neil, you probably know the following, perhaps in this order:

1) he has a seat dedicated in his memory at Kauffman Stadium, and each Royals game some member of the Kansas City community is invited to sit in this seat to honor their civic contributions

2) he was featured (and rose to national prominence) for his part in the Ken Burns’ documentary Baseball

3) he was called “Nancy” by Satchel Paige to cover one of the pitcher’s many indiscretions

The Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library is sponsoring a community read of The Soul of Baseball, and has dozens of copies available. I will participate in a group discussion of the book on Feb. 16. Then Posnanski will be at the library on Feb. 17 to talk about O’Neil, the book and his experiences.

I’m sure the Nancy story will come up. It seems to be the number one thing people want to discuss about O’Neil, and it was certainly the number one thing people asked him about while he was alive.

A great storyteller from my own life would often say “I’ve told some lies so many times I’ve come to believe they are true myself.” It seems that, in the mind of great storytellers, truth and fiction can be somewhat fluid. The stories take on a life of their own. As long as the story isn’t something too crucial, there’s no problem with this. We appreciate that great storytelling is an art, not a science.

From The Soul of Baseball, one can tell that O’Neil didn’t always tell the truth exactly as it happened. Sometimes he did this to make people feel good. Sometimes he did it because he was great at embellishing for people’s enjoyment. And sometimes he just didn’t remember everything perfectly. One can’t fault a 94-year-old man for that. He’d experienced more than 10 men normally do, and almost none of it was actually documented for posterity. So he had a trove of history to keep track of with nothing but his own memory.

I’ve heard the Nancy story told numerous times, and the details always seem a little different. I trust The Soul of Baseball probably contains them about as close as possible to the way it really happened. I assume this because I’m sure Posnanski heard it told numerous times during his travels with O’Neil and would have been able to glean the consistencies from the many versions.

If you aren’t familiar with the story, you better get a copy of The Soul of Baseball and come discuss it at the Topeka library.