Most people have favorite players. I have favorite quotes and favorite misconceptions. I have written about the quotes: “The two of them deserve each other; one’s a born liar, the other’s convicted;” “There’s nothing so limited as a limited partner in the Yankees;” “The Yankees are the evil empire.”

Those comments, made in order by Billy Martin, John McMullen and Larry Lucchino, were all made to me so I can attest to their accuracy. I can vouch, too, for the correct versions of my three favorite misconceptions:

• In 1978 the Red Sox largest lead over the Yankees was 14 games, not 14½, as many writers have often stated.

• George Steinbrenner named Dave Winfield “Mr. May” during a September 1985 series with the first-place Blue Jays, not for his 1-for-22 performance in the 1981 World Series.

• Curt Flood’s 1970 lawsuit against Major League Baseball did not lead to the creation of free agency, as has often been written, most recently in The New York Times, which compounded its misconception by throwing in Catfish Hunter’s grievance against Charlie Finley in 1974 as another factor that contributed to free agency.

In a July 13 television sports column about a new HBO documentary on Flood, Richard Sandomir wrote:

“Had Flood won, free agency would probably have arrived a few years before it was achieved in arbitrators’ rulings in favor of Catfish Hunter, and for Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally.”

In the last paragraph Sandomir wrote:

“Eventually, he turned his life around and received belated recognition from players who profited from his efforts against the reserve clause.

The column was wrong about the impact of the Hunter case and Flood’s lawsuit. Having been the Times’ primary reporter on free agency, I felt the mistakes should be corrected and sent an e-mail to the newspaper’s corrections e-mail address:

“A TV sports column on an HBO documentary about Curt Flood in the July 13 edition perpetuates two myths about the creation of free agency in baseball. The column cites the Catfish Hunter arbitration as helping achieve free agency. Not so. Hunter was a breach of contract case whose decision affected no one but Hunter. The column also makes a frequently made mistake about Flood’s lawsuit. It is incorrect to say that players ‘profited from his efforts against the reserve clause.’ Flood lost his case. It had no bearing on the Peter Seitz 1975 arbitration decision in the Messersmith-McNally case, which did create free agency. Seitz, incidentally, was the arbitrator who also decided Hunter. The column suggested the rulings were by different arbitrators.”

Days and weeks went by, and no correction appeared on page 2, where the Times runs its many corrections. If you read corrections, which I do in disbelief that so many mistakes can be made by reporters working for the Times, you will find some you might deem frivolous.

For example, a recent correction noted that Billie, and not Billy, was the correct spelling of Billie Jean King’s first name. Another correction changed another athlete’s name from John to Jon.

Yet the Times, long called the newspaper of record, did not think it was important enough to correct errors of historical proportion.

After seeing nothing for a month, I sent a copy of my e-mail to an editor on the news desk. A few more weeks went by before I finally received a response from the sports department’s corrections editor.

“Thanks for your note,´ Bob Goetz wrote. “While your points are taken about Catfish Hunter and Curt Flood, neither case existed in a vacuum. Each had significance in free agency’s development, and the article reflected that.”

I worked with Goetz, and I was not aware that he was a baseball historian or an expert on free agency. For him to excuse the need for a correction by saying Hunter and Flood “each had significance in free agency’s development” is mind-boggling.

Rather than accept Goetz’s words as fact, I called Marvin Miller, whose labor leadership of the players did lead to and produce free agency.

When I read Goetz’s e-mail to Miller, he laughed. Then he reiterated that Hunter’s breach of contract grievance was an isolated case. If anything, he said it served to educate the players on what free agency could mean for them and emboldened them to fight for it.

But he added, “It didn’t change the mind of a single owner. The owners’ position on free agency was the same after the Hunter case as it was before.”

Nor, Miller added, did the Flood case affect the owners’ thinking on the reserve clause and free agency. They always argued that elimination of the reserve clause would ruin baseball, Miller said, and Flood’s loss in the lawsuit strengthened their position.

Richard Moss, the union’s general counsel, who argued both the Hunter and the Messersmith-McNally cases, cited one possible contribution the Hunter case made to the creation of free agency.

“Peter Seitz was the first arbitrator to declare a player a free agent,” Moss said of the Hunter decision, “and he was the arbitrator in Messermith-McNally.”

Times readers, however, didn’t learn that from the Sandomir column. He wrote that “arbitrators’ (plural) rulings” decided the Hunter and Messersmith cases. The Times didn’t see a need for a correction on that error either.

This is not the first time the Times has erred in these misconceptions. It’s also not the first time the once great newspaper has stubbornly and ignorantly refused to recognize and acknowledge its errors and correct them so its readers are not misled.

Three years ago the Times ran a column that included the Mr. May misconception. In reply to my pointing out the error, the editor who was then in charge of sports corrections, Mike Abrams, justified what the columnist, Harvey Araton, had written and said he knew the timing of the origin of Mr. May. Abrams also said the Winfield remark in the column was open to a reader’s interpretation. No correction was run on that occasion either.

This is what Araton wrote; interpret it for yourself:

“More than a quarter century ago, after Steinbrenner made Winfield baseball’s highest-paid player, his generation’s A-Rod, there was the matter of the 1981 World Series – a bad performance by Winfield, a worse one by Steinbrenner. ‘I got rid of Mr. October,’ Steinbrenner said of Reggie Jackson, ‘and got Mr. May.’ The cruel tag endured, shamelessly applied during a decade of franchise inadequacy based on Steinbrenner’s imperiously mandated standards.”

Araton subsequently told me he knew it was 1985 and not 1981 but worded it poorly in the column.

“I can see where a reader might think it was ‘81,” Araton said. “I should have been more specific, maybe used another word.”

The Times should have used another word then and now: correction.

ZAMBRANO ZAPPED

With assent from the union, the Cubs have declared Carlos Zambrano finished for the season.

Fed up with the pitcher’s bad behavior, the Cubs placed Zambrano on the disqualified list without pay Aug. 13 for 30 days. They announced Sept. 2 that he would come off the list Sept. 11, and they would begin paying him, but he would not rejoin the team the rest of the season.

Given that I think the union has a strong case in support of its grievance, I would have expected the union to seek an expedited hearing in an effort to get Zambrano back on the field as soon as possible. The union, however, opted not to seek an expedited hearing.

The passivity was not seen as an indication that the union was not confident with its case. Speculation was that no matter how quickly a hearing could be held, there wouldn’t be time to get Zambrano back and pitching.

So it was likely that the union agreed to the Cubs’ desire to be rid of Zambrano for the rest of the season in return for the Cubs’ resuming his salary.

The Cubs don’t seem to have a strong case to have the loss of pay upheld. Zambrano did only one thing for which he could be disciplined. He left Turner Field before the end of the Cubs’ game with the Braves, and precedent probably shows that is worth a fine of about $500.

Zambrano also cleaned out his locker before he left the park, and he reportedly told clubhouse attendants he was retiring. Neither of those acts violated any rules and do not call for disciplinary action.

BONDS, CLEMENS AND MINOR LEAGUERS

If United States attorneys’ offices were run like the major leagues, several federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco would be back toiling in the minors.

Prosecutors in Washington botched the Roger Clemens perjury case and held their breath until Judge Reggie Walton told them they could have a second crack at Clemens after the first trial ended in a mistrial. The prosecutors prompted Walton to declare a mistrial when they showed the jury evidence he had ruled inadmissible.

The San Francisco prosecutors didn’t foul up the Barry Bonds case in such a blatant manner, but they gained conviction on only one obstruction of justice charge and failed on the perjury charges.

Judge Susan Illston declared a mistrial on the perjury charges when the jury couldn’t reach decisions on them, and the government decided not to retry Bonds on them. The government spent years and millions on its investigation and prosecution of Bonds and emerged with the equivalent baseball act of being hit with a pitch.

Although I am not a judge or a lawyer, I thought Judge Illston should throw out the obstruction conviction because it had no perjury conviction to support it. But she decided otherwise and set sentencing for Dec. 16. Clemens’ trial was scheduled for next April.