Minor YouTube celebrity and shameless self-promoter Aleksey Vayner went to Yale. Georgetown Law student – (really?) – and plagiarist Kaavya Viswanathan went to Harvard. Resident at New York Presbyterian/ Columbia Hospital Matt McCarthy went to Yale and then Harvard Medical School, so he certainly edges out his infamous Ivy peers for prestige, and with the release of “Odd Man Out”, his error-ridden memoir about his year pitching for a minor league baseball team, he may top – or at least match – both Viswanathan and Vayner for deception.

A few days ago, The New York Times reported that “Odd Man Out” – which delves into the particulars of “playing with racist, steroids-taking teammates, pitching for a profane, unbalanced manager and observing obscene behavior and speech” – contains evidence of “wide-ranging errors and misquotations”:

Several times in the book, which he devotes mostly to the antics of libidinous teammates and his manic manager, Tom Kotchman, McCarthy directly quotes people stating incorrect facts about their own lives and tells detailed (and mostly unflattering) stories about teammates who were in fact not on his team at the time. The book’s more outrageous scenes could not be independently corroborated or disproved; several teammates who were present said in interviews that they were exaggerated or simply untrue.

Is there a listing for “selective hearing” in the DSM-IV? More after the jump.

McCarthy recounts game sequences and player performances that were substantially different from what actually happened, including his own games. One scene describes Tony Reagins, the Angels’ director of player development, telling McCarthy that his contract is being restructured with incentive clauses. But a copy of McCarthy’s original contract, signed a week earlier, before he met Reagins, already included those clauses.

Embellishing scenes and conversations that cannot be proven is unethical but savvy; but lying about records? That’s just sloppy.