I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally by Jim Bouton
from the book cover

"When I was a boy in Chicago I once tried to get Alvin Dark's autograph in Wrigley Field. I leaned over the fence near the dugout and stuck out a pencil and scorecard. 'Alvin please,' I said. 'I'm a Giant fan, a Giant fan,' And Alvin Dark said, 'Take a hike son. Take a hike.'

"I recounted this incident in Ball Four. When Dark heard about it he said, Lies, all lies. I didn't even know Bouton when he was a kid.'

"All right Alvin. Pay attention."

Thus begins Jim Bouton's highly personal chapter, "The Making of a Social Leper," where we find out what's inside the man who held up a mirror to baseball until it hollered "Foul ball!" That was just one of the major, rollicking effects of Ball Four, the hilariously honest diary which broke all records for a sports book with seventeen weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Now we get a lot more honesty and hilarity about what happened to Jim Bouton, knuckleball pitcher, as a result of having written Ball Four.

What happened was rather like what Bouton's seven-year-old son Mike told his friends beside a swimming pool in Houston while his father was still with the Astros. "My dad wrote a book and now we might have to move."

But not exactly. Bouton spent half a season with Houston before the ax fell. When it did, and Bouton was sent to the minor leagues, it wasn't altogether because of Ball Four. It was because his knuckleball had turned elusive - and dangerous. Although Bouton still wonders.

It didn't really matter, because he had another job waiting for him - in television. And the first thing he did in I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally is his probing, amused, very special eye on the tube and the people who put the pictures on it.

That's only the beginning. The rest is Bouton's side-splitting encounter with Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who thought Ball Four would ruin the game; his fascinating and extraordinarily open disclosure of the money involved in writing a best seller; his tales of the angry and funny reactions of the players themselves to having appeared in Ball Four; a whole series of new portraits and anecdotes about the grown men who play this boys' game. All that and more, much more.

Jim Bouton has, in fact, done it again. He'll make you angry, he'll make you laugh, and once you've read I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally, you'll never look at baseball and television in quite the same way.

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