Ball Four by Jim Bouton (1970)
from the book cover

When Jim Bouton's brother read this book in manuscript he said, It's a great book, Jim, but what's mom going to think?"

Mom loved it. She said that after reading Portnoy's Complaint she knew all the words.

The point is that Jim Bouton, 31-year-old right-handed pitcher, has written a thoroughly honest book about baseball that's a genuine shocker. It's a shocker not because it nonchalantly shows that baseball players may, under certain circumstances, use words stronger than "golly sakes," but because it throws a harsh and achingly perceptive light on baseball-the men in the front offices, the people who play it, the way it is played on and off the field. It's the most incisive, most candid, most revealing and at the same time the funniest book ever written about the national game.

No one knows more about the nitty-gritty of baseball than Bouton. He has given his life to it. In 1969 he completed his eleventh year in the game. He has been up and he has been down. In 1963 he won 21 games for the New York Yankees. In 1964 he won 18 games for them, and two more in the World Series. In 1969 he won two games for two different teams in two different leagues. He has seen it all.

In form, the book is a diary of a season. It begins in spring training with the expansion Seattle Pilots in Arizona. It goes on to Vancouver in the Pacific Coast League when Bouton is shipped, for a brief time, to the minor leagues. It details, day to day, most of an American League season with the hapless Pilots, as Bouton, working hard with a new and surprisingly effective knuckleball, combats the Neanderthal, change-resistant minds of the baseball establishment. Finally it drops suddenly into the taut frustrations of the National League pennant race as Bouton is traded to the Houston Astros.

Yet the book is much more than a recounting of daily events. It's Bouton growing up in the game, learning the salary machinations of general managers; Bouton locking horns with the terrible-tempered Ralph Houk when he was Yankee general manager; Bouton slowly, reluctantly coming to the gut-twisting conclusion that he has lost his fast ball and must make it - if at all - with the erratic, difficult knuckleball; Bouton putting his finely tuned ear to work on the language and the fun and the clubhouse horseplay of baseball. It's Bouton capturing the bitterness under the amusing banter of the bullpen; Bouton and the boys in the back of the bus singing dirty songs about Houston manager Harry Walker, who is sitting in the front of the bus. It's Bouton showing us in horrifying yet hilarious detail the excitement and exhilaration, the boredom and frustration of playing major-league baseball every day.

Bouton holds nothing back. He writes openly about money and salaries, the attitudes of the lower echelon players toward the stars of the game, the legends and the facts of fun and games on the road. In anecdote after sidesplitting anecdote Bouton gives us an inside look at the super stars of the game, men like Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Carl Yastrzemski, Ted Williams. He illuminates the warts as well as the humor and courage of the men who play baseball for a living.

Ball Four will strip away any false notions you may have nursed about the game and people of baseball. It will make you cry. Mostly, it will make you laugh. And you'll come away from it knowing intimately the way big-league baseball is played and the boys and men who play it.

Take a look at these other Jim Bouton books:

Ball Four 1970

Ball Four Plus Ball Five (1980)

Ball Four: Twentieth Anniversary Edition (1990)

Strike Zone

I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally

I Managed Good, But Boy Did They Play Bad