Few fans alive today have had the privilege of sitting down for a few beers with the Rabbit and listening to him spin his tales. But fortunately for us, a year before his death in 1954, Rabbit reached back forty years into his memory and put his sotires down on paper after the urging of his daughter and Max Kase, former sports editor of the New York Journal-American, who had employed Maranville in a public relations position. Unfortunately, Maranville did not finish his autobiography before he died. For decades the tales rested, virtually unread, until the Graber brothers, Dallas and Ralph, discovered the manuscript inconspicuously offered for sale by a memorabilia dealer and bought it rescuing it for all future fans to enjoy.
The stories give us much autobiographical material about Rabbit. But they are not an autobiography, any more than Baseball Is a Funny Game is the autobiography of Garagiola. They tell us much history. And yet they do not comprise a history, any more than Veeck as in Wreck is a history of the Cleveland Indians.
Rabbit's memory played tricks on him, not surprising to anyone who has interviewed old men reaching back into the past. Where errors were found, I have attempted to correct them. Where Rabbit's somewhat Lardneresque prose has breached some rules preached in sixth-grade English classes, I did my best to make him readable without making him slick. In short, I tried to let Rabbit be Rabbit.
To fill in the details in Rabbit's life not covered in his stories, Bob Carroll has delved into the records and penned a more scholarly account of dates, places, and names in Bob's own irreverent, even Maranvillian, style.
