Posted on 07/14/2019 10:06:08 AM PDT by Rummyfan
Jim Bouton, the author of Ball Four, died this week. Half a decade before he wrote that classic, Bouton was a star pitcher for the New York Yankees. But arm trouble derailed him and his decline coincided with the end of the Yankee dynasty.
Bouton reinvented himself as a knuckleball pitcher, caught on with the expansion Seattle Pilots, and chronicled his season with them (and with the Houston Astros after he was traded) in a behind the scenes look at the national pastime that captured both the foibles, the anxieties, and the grind of players’ existence.
To say that Ball Four made a splash would be to understate its impact and the reaction to it. The book delighted fans but outraged much of the sports establishment. Dick Young, a leading New York sportswriter, called Bouton a “social leper.”
The librarian at Dartmouth’s Baker Library selected Ball Four for display. Planning to take a half hour break from my studies, I grabbed the book. I did no more studying until I had devoured it. This, I concluded, is the best sports book I’ve ever read.
Reading the book a few decades later, I still enjoyed it, but was less enchanted. Somehow, I hadn’t been bothered by Bouton’s snobbery, elitism, and condescension the first time around.
I remembered that Jim Brosnan, a pitcher whose two books pioneered the genre Bouton perfected, objected to Ball Four’s less than flattering treatment of Seattle manager Joe Schultz, who had coached Brosnan.
Ball Four wouldn’t be Ball Four without Schultz telling his pitchers to “smoke ’em inside” or his players to “pound the Budweiser.” But I felt that Bouton crossed the line into cruelty in his depiction of fringe players like Fred Talbot and Merritt Ranew.
I also found it unseemly that Bouton ridiculed Dooley Womack, the player Seattle received in the trade with Houston, as unworthy compensation. At the time of the trade, Womack was a better pitcher than Bouton, and had been for several years.
The Jim Bouton of Ball Four is not at all a sympathetic character.
Looking at the matter now, a few more decades down the road, I give Bouton credit for not sugarcoating his personality. He didn’t just offer a no-holds-barred look at baseball, he painted a thoroughly honest picture of Jim Bouton, the human being.
I still say Ball Four is the best sports book I’ve ever read.
Do athletes still write these kind of inside, “kiss-and-tell” accounts? I’m not aware of many such baseball books in recent years.
Maybe modern baseball players — more educated, professional, and wealthy than their predecessors — aren’t colorful enough to provide the characters for a Ball Four kind of book. Maybe the “what happens here stays here” mantra of the traditional baseball club house has regained its sway.
No matter. We don’t need more Ball Fours. We have the original, and that’s more than good enough.
RIP.
I picked up on Bouton's condescension the first time that I read it.
That said, the Yankees and Mantle wound up forgiving Bouton, so who am I to hold a grudge against Bouton.
RIP Jim Bouton.
That move to Milwaukee has a few silver linings. In the fallout from that move Seattle threatened a lawsuit against the American League. To make the lawsuit go away Seattle gets the Mariners but in order to have an even number of teams Toronto gets the Blue Jays which in turn 16 years later leads to back to back World Series success. In the fallout of that Toronto gets an NBA franchise a couple of years later in 1995. It only takes that franchise 24 seasons before it wins it all this year. So thanks Pilots/Brewers for making championships possible here in the great white north! :)
Funny/neat how things sometimes work out isn’t it? And those ‘92-’93 Jays Championship Teams were very under rated imho.
Great post/stories 76! If there was a ‘cooler’, all around team/group of guys, (any team, in any sport), than the ‘68-’69, when they really hit their stride, through the ‘74-’75 Boston Bruins I never saw it! (And the heck with those Canadians and that freakin’ dirtbag Ferguson!) I loved those guys! Derek’s book was a fun but sad read.
As Joe Garagiola put it in the title of his book Baseball Is a Funny Game.
I agree with that!
Yup, good little baseball read.
I have both of Brosnan’s books, (’The Long Season’, a diary of the 1959 season, and ‘Pennant Race’, a diary of the 1961 season), and I think the raciest kiss and tell things in them were about he and his wife knocking back a few Martinis once in awhile! (Oh the horror!) Both books are a good read to anyone who followed MLB back then!
Yes! Great documentary, also including a young Kurt Russell.
I read his book about 200 times.
"Getting on the airplane in Cleveland we ran into the Kansas City Royals. There was a lot of conversation because we're both expansion teams and a lot of us have been rescued from the same junkpile. The funniest line was about Moe Drabowski. They said he was sick on the bus the other night and puked up a panty girdle."
I stand corrected. I read the book when it came out almost 50 years ago. Not surprising my memory was off. Please note I at least got the "puking" and "panties" part right. I would have felt the total fool if I had remembered "jockstrap", or "shower thongs".
Anyway, a great book from the past, and a great ballplayer, RIP, Jim Bouton.
Yeah, and who knows how great a career Jim would have had if he had not fried his arm in ‘65?
Cool story!
My favorite baseball book. RIP Bulldog.
The stuff Bouton wrote in Ball Four was shocking back in the day. And they didn’t make big bucks back then - I remember he wrote about holding out for $30K one year, which is what even marginal players make per week now, and stars make per game.
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