The readers don’t always agree with me, and they don’t necessarily agree with each other. Last week’s column on Peter Nash, the notorious memorabilia collector, prompted these two responses:

“very good on that scumbag peter nash. i was in boston with my son a few months ago and we went to the boylston street saloon named for ‘nuf said McGreevy’. Great memorabilia there from 19th century. they told me, ‘oh, a fellow named peter nash is our curator.’ almost returned the reuben sandwich.”

“Does any of this change the fact that so many of the ‘vintage’ jerseys Halper sold to MLB for them to donate to the HoF were fakes? (And that Halper’s stories of provenance could not possibly have been true?)”

Reader No. 1 stayed on point. Reader No. 2 chose to ignore Nash and his crooked schemes and question the honesty of Barry Halper, the late renowned memorabilia collector, whom Nash has attacked even years after his death.

In the interest of full disclosure, I don’t know Nash, talked to him on the telephone once, and knew Halper, though I had no knowledge of his memorabilia activities.

What I have learned, however, is …

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Players who reach the major leagues usually arrive there by way of high school or college through the minor leagues. Although Evan Gattis did the minor league thing, he chose a widely winding path to get to the minors.

Between high school and the minors, with two brief stops at colleges in Oklahoma and Texas, Gattis – in some semblance of chronological order– spent 30 days in drug and alcohol rehabilitation and three months in an out-patient center in Arizona, worked at a pizzeria and as a ski-lift operator in Colorado, then as a janitor in Dallas and a cart boy at a golf course, plunged into spiritualism and went to Taos, N.M., where he again worked at a ski resort, then moved on to California for more spiritualism in assorted locations in the state.

One reason Gattis has given to interviewers for deciding not to accept the scholarship Texas A & M offered was …

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Known in his rapper days as Prime Minister Pete Nice, Peter Nash is known today as the epitome of what is primarily wrong with the Internet and blogs. He is also known for his propensity for losing lawsuits, accusing others of fraud while defrauding others himself and, perhaps worst of all, for forcing his father to give up the prestigious academic role he had for nearly half a century in a case that at least bordered on embezzlement.

I first encountered Nash’s name and talked to him in July 2011 for a column I wrote about how he had grotesquely maligned and tried to destroy the reputation – posthumously – of Barry Halper, a limited partner of the New York Yankees, a world renowned collector of baseball memorabilia and a genuinely good person.

Halper, it turns out, has not been the only memorabilia figure Nash has maligned unfairly. He’s still doing it and has done it to this day. He has a pattern: beat him in a lawsuit or a business deal and expect him to write viciously nasty things about you.

That’s where the Internet and blogs come in. They give Nash a free hand to do and say what he wants about whom he wants with no way of being stopped.

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