Did you hear the one about the umpire suing a catcher? He got a strikeout

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Here are the rules of tall tales.

They must start with something true.

They must grow in the retelling, so that their unreliability is recognizable. When someone starts a good tall tale, someone else in the crowd should say, “Oh, I love this one.”

They may only be told to those near and dear to you, people who understand how your affiliation with the God’s honest truth is loose and gets looser in proximity to alcohol.

Most importantly, tall tales may never be released into nature, where they may proliferate uncontrollably, grow wild and run amok.

This week, former major-league catcher Paul Lo Duca paid a great deal of money to learn Rule No. 4. During a 2019 podcast, Lo Duca told some amusing stories about umpire Joe West.

Lo Duca couldn’t remember exactly when the big one took place – 2006 or 2007. That’s a giveaway. He did remember that he was catching Billy Wagner that day. It was Mets-Phillies. West was behind home plate.

Wagner got three called strikeouts in a row. Lo Duca heard later that West was repaying a favour. Wagner had let him drive his 1957 Chevy.

That is a perfect bar story. It is just kooky enough to be true.

Small problem – West umpired one Mets-Phillies game in 2006 and 2007. Wagner did not pitch in it.

Another tall tale giveaway – fuzzy numbers. Lo Duca said he’d been ejected eight or nine times over his career by West. Is it eight or is it nine?

Well, actually, it’s one. West ejected Lo Duca one time. But in tall-tale terms, the number one only lands with a bang if you’re talking about the number of times you’ve been pronounced dead.

West took offence at the inference that he is a cheat, and not even a very ambitious one. He sued. A New York judge agreed with him. The court awarded West US$250,000 in damages. It awarded him another US$250,000 so that he could hire a PR team to repair his reputation.

This story got pushed around the internet Tuesday as an interesting oddity. Umpire sues catcher; gets strikeout. It’s a semi-decent punchline. But there is a world in which this is the first of many.

Lo Duca was working within a sacred tradition in sports – the war story. Sports are built on war stories. Everybody in the business could tell you a dozen stories about your favourite players and coaches that would blow your mind.

Are they all true? Probably not. They’re also not false. They’re somewhere in between.

You are pretty certain about the ones you experienced firsthand. Those ones are close to Bible truth. In fairness, you may have made some small adjustments to them over the years. Just to improve flow, you understand.

Would you print one of them in the newspaper? Not without hanging about 400 weasel words around it in order to make it very clear that this is kinda, sorta the way this went down, and isn’t meant to be understood as forensic evidence.

You certainly wouldn’t publicly retell any tall tale that makes someone look bad. That is contrary to the tall-tale ethos. They are meant to amuse, not injure. The distinction is the difference between a fish story and calumny.

If you have any savvy, you understand when you are being told a tall tale. You do not run off and report it like it actually happened, because it probably didn’t, and because, by its nature, it is impossible to verify.

(They like to say in my family that we are directly related to James Joyce. Are we? I have no clue and never will. That story is too good to fact check.)

Not being able to report something you heard doesn’t stop you from telling it to other hacks, improving it slightly as you do.

This may be where Lo Duca went wrong – audience confusion. It’s possible he’s told that story about the umpire who loves classic cars a million times to a million people. It may have started in something resembling testify-under-oath truth, and gradually became unrecognizable. The numbers keep getting bigger, and the identifying details keep getting fuzzier. Maybe it wasn’t even Joe West to begin with.

He may have told it to journalists before, every one of whom would have been delighted to hear it, and none of whom would have repeated it in print. Because we don’t knowingly publish things that are: a) untrue; b) have the potential to get us fired from our jobs; and c) I refer you back to b).

But now he’s recounting the story – and this is important to remember if you ever find yourself thinking of telling the one about how your ex-girlfriend’s dad maybe once killed a hitchhiker – in front of a hot mic.

People don’t seem to understand how hot mics work any more. They are no longer confined to microphones. All interviews with journalists are hot mics. If it’s connected to WiFi, your phone is a hot mic. If you’re telling the story to a bunch of people and you don’t know one of them, your audience is a hot mic. Act accordingly.

Of course, no one will. The laughter you hoped to elicit as a reward in the bar is now available 24 hours a day as likes on the internet. All of us, especially former celebrities, are moths to that flame.

With that in mind, tall tales require a couple more rules.

When telling them, avoid cruelty as best you can. No one ever sued over a lie that made them look smarter, funnier or more attractive than they really are.

And if you see even the most rudimentary technology pointed toward you – a camera, a spiral-bound notebook, a blinking cursor – go with the boring truth instead.