“You spend a good deal of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.” The final line from Ball Four. Best thing ever written in a sports book. Gives me chills every time I read it.
Yes..it was a Eulogy for baseball that has died. It's now everything I despise,Ultra greed,mindless conformity, look the other way on Cheating,Scandals etc. In the old days when the book intitially came out I only knew most of the players from Baseball cards. Big difference if a guy was struggling then...people were still behind him. Now you are a lazy piece of shit that's making millions for nothing.
I loved this book and actually got the opportunity to get Jim to sign it a few years back. It says "Smoke em inside". He was so kind. He will be missed.
Well said, the common man of baseball. Introspective guy with a good sense of humor on display in one of the greatest sports books ever written, Ball Four.
THE Ball Four story: "In the bullpen, [Fred] Talbot revealed an awful truth about Joe Pepitone. He has two different hairpieces... one day [back when Bouton was a Yankee] Fritz Peterson and I, a bit bored... went into the clubhouse and filled his hair-dryer with talcum powder. Then we cleaned it up, left it where he had and went back to watch the game... we lost it, 7-6, in extra innings. And one of the reasons why we lost was that Pepitone struck out in a clutch situation. "So everyone was tired and angry and upset and you could hear a pin drop in the clubhouse. After a while Pepitone came out of the shower and turned his hairdryer on. Whoosh! Instant white. He looked like an Italian George Washington wearing a powdered wig."
Always like Bouton. He's smart, and it was rare in the old days to get genuinely intelligent people in the sport. He has a penchant with sarcasm, and that's always good for me. The truth was meant as humor...again, not too many Einsteins in pro ball in the old days, so they didn't appreciate the cynicism of Ball Four. I'm on Jim's side every day of the week.
@alterdestiny I wish the players would keep their religious beliefs to themselves. I'm pretty sure God does not care which team wins or loses and not responsible for homers or errors
I e-mailed Jim multiple times on his website and he always wrote back. In his book he writes about a little left hander who was the champion beaver shooter according to Jim. I wrote him and asked if the lefty was Bobby Shantz and he wrote back confirming that Bobby Shantz was the great beaver shooter! RIP Jim
@@stevenyourke7901 First his name is Shantz, not Schantz. Bouton was telling beaver shooting stories and then mentioned a little lefty who was the beaver shooting champion. He never said I played with him or he was my teammate. Obviously like many stories he related they were from teammates who played with others and brought their stories to the teams Bouton played on or just speaking with other ballplayers. He didn't even name the player until I figured it out and e-mailed him. I never wrote hey Jim you had a teammate! I related the story he told in his book and said you mentioned a little lefty who you called one of the all time legendary beaver shooters and said I'd guess Bobby Shantz who was a lefty and 5'6". Shantz was a Yankee from 57 to 60 and Bouton came up in 62 so obviously he was told stories about former Yankees. Jim wrote me back great job that Shantz was the guy!
@@jacksmith5692 I know who Bobby Shantz is. I had his baseball card when I was kid. I had Jim Bouton’s, too, from 1963. So it was something Bouton must’ve heard about from his Yankee teammates. Yeah, that makes sense. I was a huge Yankees fan back in the ‘60’s, I remember how good Bouton was in 62 and 63. Shantz was no longer on the Yankees at that time. But Shantz pitched five or six innings of the seventh game of the 1960 WS against the Pirates, you can watch it on CZcams. Thanks for explaining. Cheers.
@@stevenyourke7901 He told hundreds or great stories and some were first hand and others were told to him. Dr. John Olerud a catcher played with Bouton in 1968 on the Seattle Angels for Joe Adcock and I forget the exact circumstances but it had to do with drilling a guy. Adcock wanted someone drilled and ordered Olerud to tell the pitcher to drill the guy and Olerud told him you tell him. Well Dr Olerud is a highly prominent Doctor in Seattle. His Son happens to be John Olerud, the great first baseman who was fantastic as a Met. We stole him from Toronto because they were trying to make him a 40 homer guy like the Reds tried with Paul O'Neill and both Olerud and O'Neill came to NY in steals and were told to hit like they hit and both were fantastic. I love Keith Hernandez but John Olerud was the best Mets first baseman for his 3 seasons. He averaged .315 with 21 homers, 97 ribbies, 36 doubles, 96 runs scored, 102 walks, and a .425 on base% and at first base had a .995 fielding% with a cannon arm. He took all the cut offs from right field and had a cannon for an arm. The only thing Hernandez did better was Keith was the best ever on the bunt play and his 3-6-3 was amazing but in every other metric Olerud was better as a Met. I love Keith but Olerud was better and it broke my heart to see him walk to Seattle! Well years ago I wrote Dr Olerud and told him how awesome his Son was as a Met in everyway asking him to thank John who had just retired and also related the story in Ball Four about Joe Adcock wanting his pitcher to throw at a hitter. Dr Olerud wrote me back thanking me profusely and said the story Jim told in Ball Four was 100% accurate and he had no issues with Ball Four or Jim Bouton as a teammate. Multiple times Bouton and I discussed Johnny Sain being the greatest pitching coach ever and also that Marvin Miller will pass away and then they will put him in the HOF. I was in management for 35 years and yet I thought Marvin Miller was a genius on the side of Labor. The owners were so stupid and total pigs abusing the players with outrageous actions and because of that it begot a Marvin Miller and the result is today we see 40+ million dollar salaries and ticket prices that keep out the average Joe. If the owners had only been fair and reasonable and looked to work together we would of never seen a Marvin Miller or exploding salaries like we saw. Bouton was always a class guy with me and Ball Four was a great book! Recently Tommy Davis passed away, there aren't many alive from Ball Four. Pretty sad! BTW, Bobby Shantz is still alive at age 96.
@@jacksmith5692 I read Ball Four many years ago and I enjoyed it enormously. At times, I had to laugh out loud. I was an avid Yankees fan and Bouton was a great pitcher for the Yankees in ‘63 and ‘64, but then he suffered a sore arm in ‘65 and was never the same afterward. I think he was a holdout and missed spring training and then tried to get ready too quickly once the ‘65 season started. The owners treated the players like cattle in those days. The players had no union, no bargaining power, and they were exploited pretty badly. The Yankees were pretty stingy and Bouton points of out very clearly. Yes, the owners were a bunch of stupid greedy pigs and Marvin Miller did a great job for the players. Bouton was definitely a bright guy and he had integrity. He told the truth. I wish I could have chatted with him. Bobby Shantz is still alive? Wow! He was such a little guy, I can’t imagine a guy that small pitching in the majors today. Today, it’s all about power pitching and power hitting. It’s not fun to watch anymore. I’ve lost interest. But Ball Four is a great book. Cheers.
Found a signed ball by him at a flea market for a dollar. It was buried in a box of junk anything for a buck. This was a really cool way to learn about done baseball history, and has maybe turned me into a fan
I bought Ball Four in late 1970 and I was somewhat shocked to find what all the fuss was about. The vitriol that Bouton received from players and writers alike when the book came out in the spring of 1970, stems from the fact that he violated the baseball rule: 'What is said and done in the clubhouse and dugout stays in the clubhouse and dugout.' Bouton broke that rule. He told the truth. The writers hated the book because they had been perpetuating the 'milk and cookies' image of ballplayers. The writers were in essence an extension of the public relations departments of the team; their meals and hotel bills often paid by the teams they were covering. Most players, contrary to the image that had been perpetuated, were not in bed before midnight, often staying up late, getting drunk, carousing with other women. It was much more than kiss-and-tell as Howard Cosell had called the book. Bouton wrote about the hypocrisy and racism that existed in the game. He believed a quota system existed in baseball, writing that black players had to be much better that their white counterparts, citing the Detroit Tigers of the late 1960's as an example. In addition to a number of stories, all told with great humor, Bouton wrote about how Mickey Mantle, hungover from the previous night, came off the bench to hit a tremendous game-winning home run in Minnesota. Ball Four is still talked about and discussed to this day because it is a first person account of what was said and done, over the course of a baseball season, by coaches, players, and executives, written with great humor and insight. I believe those who loved Mickey Mantle before the book came out, continued to love him up until his death.
I like what he said about the attitude that the top players can say what they want. It reminds me of the book I read back in elementary school in the 60's about the great hero General Custer. I'd rather read a story about him written by one of the natives.
Just finished foul ball. amazing how the owners deal with the public and the public interest. Love old ballparks. Grew up around one on long island called Barton's Stadium. San Rafael has a nice one in Albert Field where the Pacifics hold court. Got to see Eri Yoshida, the knuckleball "Princess." Good stuff.
In Bouton’s day, ball players had very little bargaining power and didn’t earn a lot of money. They didn’t have a union at that time and the owners mistreated them. His book exposed this exploitation and helped the players win over the public. He was washed up by the time he wrote the book and ready to quit so he probably thought he had nothing to lose by writing his expose about Major League Baseball. But in 1963-1964, he was a star pitcher with the Yankees.
I read this and also Joe Garagiola's "Baseball is a Funny Game", which is the least funny book ever written. Garagiola went from being a lousy catcher to a lousy author to a lousy broadcaster. Bouton was real.
People who dislike "Ball Four" often are too young to have been around when it came out and lack the context of the time it was released in. Ballplayers were seven years away from free agency and at the mercy of their team (very few used agents), books about the game generally couldn't have been more sanitized if the manuscript had been dropped off at the dry cleaners before being taken to the publishers and both civil rights and the Vietnam War were very real issues in 1969. Bouton both tore the curtain from baseball's well-manicured shibboleths AND showed that an athlete could actually have informed opinions on things that had nothing to do with sports. Given how so many subsequent books have rendered "Ball Four" tame by current standards (just as it did the same with both Jim Brosnan's "The Long Season" and "Pennant Race"), none have had the same notoriety inside or outside the game. When I first read it as an 11-year-old, any preconceived notions of pristine behavior of ballplayers went up in smoke. But you know what? It made me even more of a fan because it showed these guys as HUMAN. I'm glad this conversation swung to "Foul Ball" twenty minutes in. It's not nearly as well-known as "Ball Four" or as funny, but in some ways it's more important because it uses baseball as a vehicle to expose systemic corruption among politicians and members of the media. I know I dumped all my shares in GE days after I finished reading it.
One can understand why other players would be upset, having their confidences betrayed in a book. Just re-read it, it's entertaining, a glimpse into the day to day mentality of major league players. It's also very literate, others on the team besides Bouton were actually reading books, compared to the Fortnite-playing children playing adult baseball now. Good point about corporate ownership, in Toronto the Blue Jays are owned by Rogers Media, their broadcasts are owned by Rogers and a lot of the media is owned by Rogers. On the other hand the greatest threat to free speech today is from the Left.
I've read Ball Four many times. It's an interesting and sometimes funny book. That said, let's not canonize Bouton here. His book is rather judgmental and Bouton was quite self-centered, elitist and egotistical. Seemed every time a different pitcher got called into the game instead of Bouton himself he'd rip the manager or whine that he should have gotten the call. Also, Bouton told many tales out of school about other players bad behavior but failed to admit how he was more than a willing participant in bedding the Baseball Annies, etc. He seemed to portray himself as "above" the childish behaviors of drinking, partying, and cheating on wives while on the road. As it later came out, he was as guilty of these transgressions as the other players he seemed to look down on. Finally there is this: none of his teammates knew he was writing a book and things he revealed were really "kiss and tell" stories. Many of Bouton's teammates later described him as a self-centered, selfish and obnoxious teammate. I'm sure like most of us, he was a complicated man, not an icon. Read his first wife's book, Home Games. She gives a rather different take on Jim Bouton the man.
I just finished "Ball Four" and I can only say it may have been ground breaking in its time but I was very disappointed in the book. He added an addendum in 1981 called "Ball Five" which I found more engaging. If you've never read the book I would recommend you skip the first 398 pages. It's just a daily diary of his career with the Seattle Pilots, Vancouver & the Houston Astros. I found it incredibly boring. He played on 2 NY Yankee World Series teams in the 60s...you'd have thought he would've written more on those years than anything. Even though he still had some resentment and animus toward his old team. I would've thought he would tell of his meetings with some of the bigger names players he faced down. He did mention Rod Carew, Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays but that was in "Ball Five". I laughed only once in the whole book. That was on page 338 when Spec Richardson (GM of the Astros) interrupting a private conversation 5 Latinos were having. Bouton, for the most part, seemed like a royal pain in the ass to the organizations he played for. Every pitcher wants to get in there and play but he felt like he was privileged. I've only read a few other sports books but this was seriously lacking. He said commissioner Bowie Kuhn begged him to retract everything he wrote in his book Why?. There was nothing in here that was slanderous or libelous to any player or MLB. Rarely have I read any book that I feel was a waste of my time. But this one was.
“You spend a good deal of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.” The final line from Ball Four. Best thing ever written in a sports book. Gives me chills every time I read it.
Yes..it was a Eulogy for baseball that has died. It's now everything I despise,Ultra greed,mindless conformity, look the other way on Cheating,Scandals etc. In the old days when the book intitially came out I only knew most of the players from Baseball cards. Big difference if a guy was struggling then...people were still behind him. Now you are a lazy piece of shit that's making millions for nothing.
I loved this book and actually got the opportunity to get Jim to sign it a few years back. It says "Smoke em inside". He was so kind. He will be missed.
POUND THE BUDWEISER!
Don Reed Up and at ‘em. Fuck ‘em all. Let it all hang out.”
RIP Jim Bouton. A great American.
RIP Jim Bouton, one of my all time boyhood heroes, purely based on his book. One of the best books of all time, not just in the sports category.
Well said, the common man of baseball. Introspective guy with a good sense of humor on display in one of the greatest sports books ever written, Ball Four.
Seen the 2000 edition? I can't praise it high enough.
He reminds me of my dad.
one of my all time favorite books ..
Loved Ball Four, it was a great Book to read, period!!!!!
Ditto. I still have a dogeared copy on the shelf.
THE Ball Four story:
"In the bullpen, [Fred] Talbot revealed an awful truth about Joe Pepitone. He has two different hairpieces... one day [back when Bouton was a Yankee] Fritz Peterson and I, a bit bored... went into the clubhouse and filled his hair-dryer with talcum powder. Then we cleaned it up, left it where he had and went back to watch the game... we lost it, 7-6, in extra innings. And one of the reasons why we lost was that Pepitone struck out in a clutch situation.
"So everyone was tired and angry and upset and you could hear a pin drop in the clubhouse. After a while Pepitone came out of the shower and turned his hairdryer on. Whoosh! Instant white. He looked like an Italian George Washington wearing a powdered wig."
Great interview
Great Cincinnati story and love the resolution with the Mick and the Yankees
I love him so much.
Always like Bouton. He's smart, and it was rare in the old days to get genuinely intelligent people in the sport. He has a penchant with sarcasm, and that's always good for me. The truth was meant as humor...again, not too many Einsteins in pro ball in the old days, so they didn't appreciate the cynicism of Ball Four. I'm on Jim's side every day of the week.
if you were not interested then why did you post anything to this thread?@alterdestiny
@alterdestiny I wish the players would keep their religious beliefs to themselves. I'm pretty sure God does not care which team wins or loses and not responsible for homers or errors
I e-mailed Jim multiple times on his website and he always wrote back. In his book he writes about a little left hander who was the champion beaver shooter according to Jim. I wrote him and asked if the lefty was Bobby Shantz and he wrote back confirming that Bobby Shantz was the great beaver shooter!
RIP Jim
I wonder how Bouton knew Schantz. They never played on the same team or even in the same league.
@@stevenyourke7901 First his name is Shantz, not Schantz. Bouton was telling beaver shooting stories and then mentioned a little lefty who was the beaver shooting champion. He never said I played with him or he was my teammate. Obviously like many stories he related they were from teammates who played with others and brought their stories to the teams Bouton played on or just speaking with other ballplayers.
He didn't even name the player until I figured it out and e-mailed him. I never wrote hey Jim you had a teammate! I related the story he told in his book and said you mentioned a little lefty who you called one of the all time legendary beaver shooters and said I'd guess Bobby Shantz who was a lefty and 5'6". Shantz was a Yankee from 57 to 60 and Bouton came up in 62 so obviously he was told stories about former Yankees.
Jim wrote me back great job that Shantz was the guy!
@@jacksmith5692 I know who Bobby Shantz is. I had his baseball card when I was kid. I had Jim Bouton’s, too, from 1963. So it was something Bouton must’ve heard about from his Yankee teammates. Yeah, that makes sense. I was a huge Yankees fan back in the ‘60’s, I remember how good Bouton was in 62 and 63. Shantz was no longer on the Yankees at that time. But Shantz pitched five or six innings of the seventh game of the 1960 WS against the Pirates, you can watch it on CZcams. Thanks for explaining. Cheers.
@@stevenyourke7901 He told hundreds or great stories and some were first hand and others were told to him. Dr. John Olerud a catcher played with Bouton in 1968 on the Seattle Angels for Joe Adcock and I forget the exact circumstances but it had to do with drilling a guy. Adcock wanted someone drilled and ordered Olerud to tell the pitcher to drill the guy and Olerud told him you tell him.
Well Dr Olerud is a highly prominent Doctor in Seattle. His Son happens to be John Olerud, the great first baseman who was fantastic as a Met. We stole him from Toronto because they were trying to make him a 40 homer guy like the Reds tried with Paul O'Neill and both Olerud and O'Neill came to NY in steals and were told to hit like they hit and both were fantastic.
I love Keith Hernandez but John Olerud was the best Mets first baseman for his 3 seasons. He averaged .315 with 21 homers, 97 ribbies, 36 doubles, 96 runs scored, 102 walks, and a .425 on base% and at first base had a .995 fielding% with a cannon arm. He took all the cut offs from right field and had a cannon for an arm.
The only thing Hernandez did better was Keith was the best ever on the bunt play and his 3-6-3 was amazing but in every other metric Olerud was better as a Met. I love Keith but Olerud was better and it broke my heart to see him walk to Seattle!
Well years ago I wrote Dr Olerud and told him how awesome his Son was as a Met in everyway asking him to thank John who had just retired and also related the story in Ball Four about Joe Adcock wanting his pitcher to throw at a hitter. Dr Olerud wrote me back thanking me profusely and said the story Jim told in Ball Four was 100% accurate and he had no issues with Ball Four or Jim Bouton as a teammate.
Multiple times Bouton and I discussed Johnny Sain being the greatest pitching coach ever and also that Marvin Miller will pass away and then they will put him in the HOF. I was in management for 35 years and yet I thought Marvin Miller was a genius on the side of Labor. The owners were so stupid and total pigs abusing the players with outrageous actions and because of that it begot a Marvin Miller and the result is today we see 40+ million dollar salaries and ticket prices that keep out the average Joe.
If the owners had only been fair and reasonable and looked to work together we would of never seen a Marvin Miller or exploding salaries like we saw.
Bouton was always a class guy with me and Ball Four was a great book!
Recently Tommy Davis passed away, there aren't many alive from Ball Four. Pretty sad!
BTW, Bobby Shantz is still alive at age 96.
@@jacksmith5692 I read Ball Four many years ago and I enjoyed it enormously. At times, I had to laugh out loud. I was an avid Yankees fan and Bouton was a great pitcher for the Yankees in ‘63 and ‘64, but then he suffered a sore arm in ‘65 and was never the same afterward. I think he was a holdout and missed spring training and then tried to get ready too quickly once the ‘65 season started. The owners treated the players like cattle in those days. The players had no union, no bargaining power, and they were exploited pretty badly. The Yankees were pretty stingy and Bouton points of out very clearly. Yes, the owners were a bunch of stupid greedy pigs and Marvin Miller did a great job for the players. Bouton was definitely a bright guy and he had integrity. He told the truth. I wish I could have chatted with him. Bobby Shantz is still alive? Wow! He was such a little guy, I can’t imagine a guy that small pitching in the majors today. Today, it’s all about power pitching and power hitting. It’s not fun to watch anymore. I’ve lost interest. But Ball Four is a great book. Cheers.
Found a signed ball by him at a flea market for a dollar. It was buried in a box of junk anything for a buck. This was a really cool way to learn about done baseball history, and has maybe turned me into a fan
His book is very honest, entertaining, compelling, lovely.
I bought Ball Four in late 1970 and I was somewhat shocked to find what all the fuss was about.
The vitriol that Bouton received from players and writers alike when the book came out in the spring of 1970, stems from the fact that he violated the baseball rule: 'What is said and done in the clubhouse and dugout stays in the clubhouse and dugout.' Bouton broke that rule. He told the truth. The writers hated the book because they had been perpetuating the 'milk and cookies' image of ballplayers. The writers were in essence an extension of the public relations departments of the team; their meals and hotel bills often paid by the teams they were covering. Most players, contrary to the image that had been perpetuated, were not in bed before midnight, often staying up late, getting drunk, carousing with other women.
It was much more than kiss-and-tell as Howard Cosell had called the book. Bouton wrote about the hypocrisy and racism that existed in the game. He believed a quota system existed in baseball, writing that black players had to be much better that their white counterparts, citing the Detroit Tigers of the late 1960's as an example. In addition to a number of stories, all told with great humor, Bouton wrote about how Mickey Mantle, hungover from the previous night, came off the bench to hit a tremendous game-winning home run in Minnesota.
Ball Four is still talked about and discussed to this day because it is a first person account of what was said and done, over the course of a baseball season, by coaches, players, and executives, written with great humor and insight.
I believe those who loved Mickey Mantle before the book came out, continued to love him up until his death.
I love Jim Bouton- what a great human being. RIP, you did your part, and we will never forget.
Sorry to lose you. RIP Jim.
Read Ball Four 45 yrs ago. Best sports book I've read and I have read a ton of them. Reading Willie Mays now.
Get ahold of the 2000 Final Pitch edition. The material added to it is amazing.
Only 83 likes... this shows how ignorant we really are.
I had Bouton’s 1963 baseball card. He was great in 63 and 64. Won two games in the 64 WS.
Thanks
I like what he said about the attitude that the top players can say what they want. It reminds me of the book I read back in elementary school in the 60's about the great hero General Custer. I'd rather read a story about him written by one of the natives.
Just finished foul ball. amazing how the owners deal with the public and the public interest. Love old ballparks. Grew up around one on long island called Barton's Stadium. San Rafael has a nice one in Albert Field where the Pacifics hold court. Got to see Eri Yoshida, the knuckleball "Princess." Good stuff.
I just read Ball Four and I’ve been watching everything about Jim.
In Bouton’s day, ball players had very little bargaining power and didn’t earn a lot of money. They didn’t have a union at that time and the owners mistreated them. His book exposed this exploitation and helped the players win over the public. He was washed up by the time he wrote the book and ready to quit so he probably thought he had nothing to lose by writing his expose about Major League Baseball. But in 1963-1964, he was a star pitcher with the Yankees.
15:48 Right he wasn't out to hurt Mantle he was trying to help him get off alcohol and speed
RIP BULLDOG
Read Ball four at least three times cover to cover, it never gets old
His ex-wife’s book Home Games with Co-author Nancy Marshall was good too.
Sadly, I read where he is suffering from dementia.
I read this and also Joe Garagiola's "Baseball is a Funny Game", which is the least funny book ever written. Garagiola went from being a lousy catcher to a lousy author to a lousy broadcaster. Bouton was real.
Curt Flood also exposed the mistreatment of players by the owners
RIP Jim Bouton, a Big Leaguer and a class act.
Corporate never likes workers who speak out. So sad the yanks parted with him.
People who dislike "Ball Four" often are too young to have been around when it came out and lack the context of the time it was released in. Ballplayers were seven years away from free agency and at the mercy of their team (very few used agents), books about the game generally couldn't have been more sanitized if the manuscript had been dropped off at the dry cleaners before being taken to the publishers and both civil rights and the Vietnam War were very real issues in 1969.
Bouton both tore the curtain from baseball's well-manicured shibboleths AND showed that an athlete could actually have informed opinions on things that had nothing to do with sports. Given how so many subsequent books have rendered "Ball Four" tame by current standards (just as it did the same with both Jim Brosnan's "The Long Season" and "Pennant Race"), none have had the same notoriety inside or outside the game. When I first read it as an 11-year-old, any preconceived notions of pristine behavior of ballplayers went up in smoke. But you know what? It made me even more of a fan because it showed these guys as HUMAN.
I'm glad this conversation swung to "Foul Ball" twenty minutes in. It's not nearly as well-known as "Ball Four" or as funny, but in some ways it's more important because it uses baseball as a vehicle to expose systemic corruption among politicians and members of the media. I know I dumped all my shares in GE days after I finished reading it.
Pound them Buds !!!!!!!
A shame he never had to deal with Facebook.
One can understand why other players would be upset, having their confidences betrayed in a book. Just re-read it, it's entertaining, a glimpse into the day to day mentality of major league players. It's also very literate, others on the team besides Bouton were actually reading books, compared to the Fortnite-playing children playing adult baseball now.
Good point about corporate ownership, in Toronto the Blue Jays are owned by Rogers Media, their broadcasts are owned by Rogers and a lot of the media is owned by Rogers. On the other hand the greatest threat to free speech today is from the Left.
02:04 --- Who dressed the two of them identically? They look like Tweedledum and Tweedledee! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweedledum_and_Tweedledee
I've read Ball Four many times. It's an interesting and sometimes funny book. That said, let's not canonize Bouton here. His book is rather judgmental and Bouton was quite self-centered, elitist and egotistical. Seemed every time a different pitcher got called into the game instead of Bouton himself he'd rip the manager or whine that he should have gotten the call. Also, Bouton told many tales out of school about other players bad behavior but failed to admit how he was more than a willing participant in bedding the Baseball Annies, etc. He seemed to portray himself as "above" the childish behaviors of drinking, partying, and cheating on wives while on the road. As it later came out, he was as guilty of these transgressions as the other players he seemed to look down on. Finally there is this: none of his teammates knew he was writing a book and things he revealed were really "kiss and tell" stories. Many of Bouton's teammates later described him as a self-centered, selfish and obnoxious teammate. I'm sure like most of us, he was a complicated man, not an icon. Read
his first wife's book, Home Games. She gives a rather different take on Jim Bouton the man.
I just finished "Ball Four" and I can only say it may have been ground breaking in its time but I was very disappointed in the book. He added an addendum in 1981 called "Ball Five" which I found more engaging. If you've never read the book I would recommend you skip the first 398 pages. It's just a daily diary of his career with the Seattle Pilots, Vancouver & the Houston Astros. I found it incredibly boring. He played on 2 NY Yankee World Series teams in the 60s...you'd have thought he would've written more on those years than anything. Even though he still had some resentment and animus toward his old team. I would've thought he would tell of his meetings with some of the bigger names players he faced down. He did mention Rod Carew, Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays but that was in "Ball Five". I laughed only once in the whole book. That was on page 338 when Spec Richardson (GM of the Astros) interrupting a private conversation 5 Latinos were having. Bouton, for the most part, seemed like a royal pain in the ass to the organizations he played for. Every pitcher wants to get in there and play but he felt like he was privileged. I've only read a few other sports books but this was seriously lacking. He said commissioner Bowie Kuhn begged him to retract everything he wrote in his book Why?. There was nothing in here that was slanderous or libelous to any player or MLB. Rarely have I read any book that I feel was a waste of my time. But this one was.