Baseball's Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., promotes itself as the place fans go for an escape from the often-ugly realities of the game. But as veteran journalist and novelist Zev Chafets proves, the hall is more like a repository of everything baseball would like to forget.

One year he attended the hall's induction ceremony only to encounter, among the former players:

"A convicted drug dealer, a reformed cokehead who narrowly beat a lifetime suspension from baseball, a celebrated sex addict, an Elders of Zion conspiracy nut, a pitcher who wrote a book about how he cheated his way into the Hall, a well-known and highly arrested drunk driver, and a couple of nasty bean-ball artists. They had been washed clean by the magical powers of Cooperstown."

Some of the legends enshrined in the hall are often sanitized including Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker and Rogers Hornsby.

The hall's errors, as Chafets makes clear, go beyond ignoring the sins of some of its greatest players. One of the book's chapters reveals in detail how the powers in the commissioner's office make back-door deals, which is never openly admitted.

The most notorious example of this power is the shutting out of Marvin Miller, founder of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Miller said the late great Red Barber "ranks with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson as one of the three most important men in baseball history."

"Cooperstown Confidential" is bold, intelligent, gutsy. Chafets is strongest on what is soon to be the next controversy of the Hall -- steroids.

The four New York Daily News reporters who wrote "American Icon" should have read Chafets' book first, because those negative aspects of the game are just about all that make up this book.

And if you don't like Roger Clemens -- and there are so many who don't that one questions why the authors would call him an "icon" -- the book is a treasure trove of unflattering innuendoes.

Beyond this kind of gossip-mongering, the reader will find little new about Clemens' alleged drug use. The authors even admit that his only real accuser, his former trainer, Brian McNamee, is "not a perfect witness."

There's little evidence presented here that drugs actually boosted Clemens' performance.

So anecdotes and urban legends are transformed into fact.