Michael Beschloss is described as a presidential historian, the author of nine books and a contributor to NBC News and PBS NewsHour. He has also become a contributor to The New York Times and as such has become a revisionist of baseball history. Twice in the last two months, in essays about Sandy Koufax and Pete Rose, he has incorrectly characterized the significance of their acts.

Both Beschloss essays appeared in the Times, which three years ago this week initiated the practice of revising baseball history that paved the way for Beschloss to engage in his own exercise in revisionist baseball history.

The Times, which labels these pieces “History Source,” has aided and abetted its spread of faulty history by failing to correct – or properly correct – and sometimes even acknowledge its mistakes when they are pointed out.

No correction has been sighted at this writing for the mistakes Beschloss made in his piece about the 1965 joint holdout of Koufax and Los Angeles Dodgers teammate Don Drysdale.

When I initially read the piece last month, I failed to see any reason for it to be done at that time. Since the dual holdout occurred before the 1966 season, there is no 50^th anniversary to celebrate the historic holdout, but Beschloss wrote it anyway and the Times published it. Too bad they couldn’t have gotten it right.

Once I read the piece, I wrote an e-mail to Jason Stallman, the Times sports editor:

“I have just read the Koufax-Drysdale piece in Saturday’s paper and though I feel I must have missed something because I failed to see a reason for running a 50-year-old story with nothing new in it, I feel the need to make two comments:

“1. The writer says Bavasi” – Buzzie Bavasi, the Dodgers’ general manager – “was wrong in saying ‘It will never happen again.’ It never has happened again. Two players have never negotiated jointly since. The union negotiates a minimum salary, but it does not negotiate all players’ salaries. The story’s claim is also wrong that the joint holdout ‘changed the relationship between baseball management and players, paving the way for the big-money game of our day.’

“The joint holdout did not change contract negotiations between management and players, and it did not pave the way for higher salaries. None of that happened until the union won free agency 10 years later.

“2. The writer missed the most significant development stemming from the holdout. When the owners and the players negotiated the rules of free agency in 1976, the owners, mindful of Koufax-Drysdale, insisted that a provision be included in the agreement saying that players ‘shall not act in concert with other players.’ The union agreed but said the provision naturally also had to say that ‘clubs shall not act in concert with other clubs.’

“That was the clause that nailed the owners in three collusion cases (1985-86-87) and wound up costing them $280 million in settlement of the cases. That was an expensive way of shooting themselves in the foot.”

That was the sort of development that should have been meat for an historian, showing how history was affected by a famous case well beyond the case itself, but the connection eluded this so-called baseball historian. It wouldn’t have been an exclusive development for Beschloss; I have written about it, as I assume others have. But at least Beschloss would have covered the key post-holdout development.

Failing to mention the development did not constitute an error in need of a correction, but other elements did. The Times, however, has not seen it necessary to correct Beschloss’ errors.

The Times took a different approach to the mistakes in Beschloss’ piece on Rose.

A few days before last week’s All-Star game the Times published a Beschloss essay on the All-Star incident in 1970 in which Rose ran over catcher Ray Fosse with the winning run in the 12^th inning.

“As for Rose,” Beschloss wrote, “it was later observed that it was after his collision with Fosse that a few of his ardent loyalists began to suspect that there was something off-kilter about the phenomenon they called ‘Charlie Hustle.’

I didn’t recall anything that Beschloss might have been referring to, and I called another baseball writer to check his recollection. Bob Hertzel covered the Cincinnati Reds of Rose’s era and knew Rose as well as any writer.

“I did see that and I have no idea what he was talking about,” Hertzel said by telephone Friday. “He was a hero after that in Cincinnati. I have no clue what he was talking about.”

Beschloss went on:

“Despite Rose’s astonishing 23-year career as player and manager – leading the majors in games played, hits and at-bats – he is still at least as well known for the misbehavior that has kept him out of the Hall of Fame: suspension and fines for ‘deliberately shoving an umpire’ (1988); permanent exclusion from Major League Baseball after charges that he had gambled on games (1989), and a five-month sentence for filing false federal income tax returns (1990).”

Contrary to Beschloss’ representation of Rose’s career problems his misbehavior that has kept him out of the Hall of Fame was limited to his lifetime ban for betting on baseball games. His shoving an umpire and prison sentence for filing false tax returns had nothing to do with his exclusion from the Hall of Fame.

As if those errors weren’t bad enough, the Times compounded its treatment of the essay by the adjustment it made to it after I pointed out Beschloss’ mistakes. Rather than running a formal correction on page 2 of the paper and appending it to the article in its archives, the Times rewrote the erroneous passage and slipped the rewritten sentences into both versions of the article, the one on the website and the one that is in the paper’s archives.

Voila! No mistakes, no correction. Readers would never know. I always thought the idea of running a correction on page 2 was to alert readers to the mistake so they would be able to see there had been a mistake and now knew what it was supposed to have been.

By replacing a sentence or a paragraph after readers have read the article doesn’t do them any good.

The page 2 corrections are one of my favorite parts of the paper. I will cite a few recent corrections:

• Just last Saturday the Times said a Thursday column had the wrong “Twitter handle” of a professional British basketball player from Staten Island.
• A correction noted that an article about the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum had the wrong queen presenting a trophy in 1947, saying it was Queen Elizabeth, not Elizabeth II.
• A soccer column had Brazil’s semifinal World Cup game played in Bela Horizonte when it was really played in Belo Horizonte.
• A soccer article had Brazilian fans being nervous about a game that was played Thursday not Friday.
• A soccer column spelled a U.S. player’s given name Aaron instead of Aron.
• An article about the sale of the Los Angeles Clippers to Steve Ballmer called his former title at Microsoft chairman instead of chief executive.

The Times presumably has its reasons for correcting some errors and not others, but it can’t always explain its reasons.

I have to recount my experience three years ago trying to get the Times to correct the errors foisted on its readers in a television column by Richard Sandomir about the creation of free agency in baseball.

Sandomir, writing about an HBO documentary about Curt Flood, attributed that creation to Flood’s federal lawsuit against Major League Baseball and a breach-of-contract grievance by Catfish Hunter against Oakland A’s owner Charlie Finley.

Flood, however, lost his lawsuit, in federal court and the United States Supreme Court, and neither he nor any other player ever benefited from the suit. Hunter won his grievance, but only he benefited.

I tried unsuccessfully to convince Times editors that free agency came into baseball courtesy of the ruling by arbitrator Peter Seitz in the Messersmith-McNally grievance.

I argued my case in e-mail messages to the corrections editor in the sports department, the sports editor, an assistant managing editor, the Times’ chief corrections editor, the public editor and the columnist to no avail.

The most ridiculous reaction came from Greg Brock, the corrections chief, and Arthur Brisbane, the public editor.

“If the Catfish Hunter case is one of these queries, you should go ahead and take that up with the public editor. I spent an enormous amount of time – too much – on that one. I talked to about 8 editors. We do not think that is correctable. That is the final decision and we’re not going to debate it and discuss it further. So there is no point in sending me back a lengthy rebuttal. Again, you can appeal to the public editor.”

So I wrote Brisbane a lengthy e-mail explaining the situation, and he responded by asking if I could provide him with a list of books that objectively addressed the issue. I provided him with the titles of about half a dozen quality books, but I went one step further, the clincher I felt.

I gave him Marvin Miller’s telephone number. Miller said he would be happy to speak with Brisbane. That, I was certain, would be the clincher. If the Times still refused to run a correction, Brisbane would write a column, and Times readers would finally learn the truth about the creation of free agency.

Wrong. To my shock and great disappointment, Brisbane never called Miller. He never learned the truth for himself, and he never wrote about it.

Shortly after Stallman became the Times sports editor early last year, I renewed my correction quest. After I submitted my evidence and discussed the matter with him, Stallman asked me to write a piece that would be camouflaged correction. I wasn’t able to say I was correcting a two-year-old mistake.

But I was able to spell out how free agency began and how it didn‘t. In this instance I am using the website to spell out and correct Times errors the Times would apparently prefer not to acknowledge and have to correct, out in the open or camouflaged.

As for the historian Michael Beschloss, the Times might want to give him an occasional pop history quiz to check his bona fides. After all, the Times published his latest piece of history Saturday, which told of Dwight Eisenhower’s desire to play major league baseball and his time as a semi-pro player under an assumed name.

Beschloss’ story might be 100 percent accurate, but how can we be sure, knowing what he doesn’t know about important facets of baseball history?