Bouton had been a hotshot pitcher for the New York Yankees in the early 1960s, but due to arm troubles, he had found himself bouncing around, struggling on the margins of the big leagues. In the course of attempting to reinvent himself as a knuckleball pitcher, Bouton hooked on with the American League expansion team the Seattle Pilots during their inaugural year in 1969.
“Ball Four” is a season-long running diary of that 1969 campaign, focusing on Bouton’s attempts to mount his comeback. However, it was his observations and anecdotes about other players, about managers and administrators, that really made the book into the seminal work that it became.
Bouton’s stories about his Pilots teammates, and especially his manager Joe Schultz, were bitingly funny. And the impressions he shared about his former Yankee teammates – including legendary figures such as Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford – were equally entertaining.
What these stories were not, however, was particularly complimentary. They didn’t always portray his baseball fellow travelers in the most positive of lights. Bouton’s revealing of the world of the locker room was particularly enlightening; readers got a real sense of the crass crudity of that pocket universe. Bouton also discussed the cold, harsh realities of injury (this was in the years before free agency and guaranteed big-money contracts) and the proliferation of amphetamines among ballplayers.
As you might guess, the book was not well-received by the baseball establishment. So many in the game felt that “Ball Four” was a betrayal of some sort of sacred trust. Bouton’s career suffered because of it; he was soon out of the game. Granted, some of that was due to Bouton’s own struggles, but one imagines he would have been given another chance or two had he not been the guy who wrote “that damned book.”
In this day of complete access, social media scoops and the 24/7 news cycle, the idea of outrage against a sports insider publishing a tell-all book is almost quaint. But at the time, “Ball Four” was incendiary; no one had ever been so frank in relating the truth behind the scenes of professional sports.
Bouton opened the door for what we consider modern sports reporting. He ushered in an age of honest sports writing, taking the genre beyond the soft-selling hero-worship that had been its baseline. Instead of blandly burnished false images, we got a peek at who these players really were. And far from being driven away, we were drawn even closer – our idols were flawed, those flaws made them human and that humanity made them more interesting.
Jim Bouton was a trailblazer. His contributions to how we experience and consume the sport of baseball are immeasurable. He changed the way we look at our heroes; even someone like me, who came to the book some two decades after it was published. Nearly half-a-century after the book first exploded into the cultural consciousness, it remains an important touchstone for anyone who has ever wanted to know the stories beneath the stories of our MLB idols.
Thank you, Mr. Bouton. Smoke ‘em inside.
