I Managed Good, But Boy Did They Play Bad by Jim Bouton
from the book cover

Baseball managers are different from you and me.

One manager, as Jim Bouton reveals in "I Managed Good, But Boy Did They Play Bad," used to give signals from the third base coaching box while standing on his head. Another, Bouton reveals, would announce the between-games menu during the first game of a doubleheader. ("Men, between games of this doubleheader, we have a choice of ham, roast beef or tuna salad.") A very flakey group.

Putting up with overbearing owners, devious general managers, bloodthirsty fans, pushy reporters and, worst of all, baseball players will make you flakey.

So can living with the knowledge that being the second best manager in all of baseball is just not good enough.

That's the life. From John McGraw, George Stallings (he called his boys "you Stanley Steamer clowns") and Connie Mack early in baseball's history, to Yogi Berra and Dick Williams today, "I Managed Good..." shows how a manager copes. And what happens if he doesn't.

Here are some of the finest baseball writers around, like Roger Kahn and Edward Linn and John Lardner, digging deep into the Derochers and McCarthys, and finding out how they are different from you and me and why.

And here are some of the finest non-baseball writers around, like Bob Considine and James Thurber, doing their own sort of digging, about managers you may not have heard of, like Rocky Bridges and Squawks Magrew (Squawks Magrew?).

And here, most of all, is Jim Bouton, ex-major-leaguer and general pain to the baseball establishment. Working with Neil Offen, ex-newspaperman and general pain to the managers he interviewed, Bouton shows another reason why managers are different: They're funny.

You'll laugh out loud when he tells about the best advice he ever got from a manager and the best pep talk he ever heard a manager give. He takes you inside the dugouts, the clubhouses, the hotel rooms, the bars, laughing all the way.

Sometimes the laughter has a sharp edge. Bouton explains why there has never been a black manager (What general manager wants to trade girlfriends with a black?), and why managers have been playing the wrong percentages only since the beginning of time.

With his less-than-reverant, inside, argumentative comments sprinkled throughout the book, Bouton shows you another side of Casey Stengel, what Joe McCarthy meant to him, what Leo Derocher meant to Willie Mays, what Joe Schultz (the manager he wasn't) meant to Bouton becoming a broadcaster.

And there are pictures, too. Eighty of them. Pictures you've never seen before. And may never see again. And there is a complete table of managers and how they finished. And then... What is all means is that "I Managed Good, But Boy Did They Play Bad" is to baseball managers what the Oxford English Dictionary is to words.

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