Ball Four quote, Jim Bouton: “I was so drunk last night that this morning I puked up a pantyhose!”
Seeing as how Mickey Mantle was my by far favorite player, I’ll never forget how Bouton wrote that you knew you had it made with the Yankees when Mantle, Ford and Richardson invited you to the roof of the Watergate Hotel in DC to look through Mantle’s telescope into the windows of the hotel across the way...
“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.”
Usually the most compelling and fascinating people are those that are brutally honest about themselves and others. They may bot always come out as likable but are by far the most interesting and enlightening.
I haven’t read the book, but it sounds like one I would enjoy.
This is a sad day. “Smoke em inside” was a code response my group of friends used whenever somebody provided useless advice. (My high school baseball coach was very fond of “throw strikes they can’t hit”.) I also remember Bouton’s sequel - “I coached good, but boy did they play lousy”.
“The Battered Bastards Of Baseball” if you haven’t seen this film about the Portland Mavericks you are missing out. Bouton actually starts his comeback there.
Side note, during the 1970s, my father worked for a charter service at Logan Airport and they had a contract at the time with the Boston Bruins, who would charter their planes for road trips. As a result, my father got to know some of the Bruins personally and on occasion, he and his co-workers would get invited to have drinks with them in a local bar. For instance, they'd land at Logan early afternoon from a road game the night before and would head straight to the bar, telling my Dad to head over after his shift. So he had some wild stories.
For example, on one occasion, one of the players (Wayne Cashman) got so inebriated that he was locked up in the drunk tank and he used his one phone call to place a huge take-out order from a local Chinese restaurant, inviting all the officers in the jailhouse to share the food with him. He was then let out in the morning with no charges and no one the wiser. In those days, no sports writer would dare risk his career (and they were all men in those days) by putting these kind of stories in the paper. So the athletes got away with a lot as the sports beat reporters were part of the club.
Derek Sanderson wrote a good book on those days of the "Big Bad Bruins" by the way. He said if not for all the partying, the Bruins would have won at least three more Stanley Cups in that era (they won in '70 and '72)j as they had a pretty awesome team with the likes of Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito.
It's amazing to think about how much more some of these earlier athletes could have accomplished (i.e. Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle) if not for all the excess. For example, look at Tom Brady who takes discipline, hard work and clean living to the extreme. As a result, he will likely go down as the greatest QB in NFL history. How much better would say, Joe Namath, have been if he had adopted a Tom Brady lifestyle and work ethic?
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.
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!
I read his book about 200 times.
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.