Ball Four literally rocked the baseball world when it came out. Bouton was reviled and castigated no end for dating to Sully the images of the baseball hero’s of the day.
Compared to the behavior of the major league jerks in the game these days,Bouton’s book simply humanized the players.
I proudly still have my autographed Ball Four book. The funny thing is that he got the notoriety but there was a book written about 10 years earlier that was similar but forgotten. The reason Ball Four was so notorious in it’s day was that it revealed that Mickey Mantle was not the saint everyone thought during his playing days.