Rob Neyer is at his absolute best when he’s writing historically. He has a tremendously large baseball library and, it appears anyway, he either has most of it memorized or at least painstakingly indexed.  Yesterday he used that brain and those tools to put together a great column. The subject: the stories behind the players and coaches in the movie “42” who served as the movie’s villains.

For what it’s worth, the movie got their roles down pretty good as far as these things go. But even though a lot of historical drama amps up the bad guy factor to comical proportions, even with real life figures, Rob notes that the makers of “42” seemed to avoid that for the most part.

Like I said, great stuff. Well, except for the part where he claims that the actor who played Wash in “Firefly” wasn’t handsome. That one just hurt. I…