![]() ![]() ![]() Sports heroes were portrayed as Jack Armstrong types, and Bouton tore away the curtain to reveal the reality of it all.Ī biography about Bouton? Could one be written in the same spirit as Ball Four - funny, perceptive and thoughtful? Did we really care that Mickey Mantle went up to pinch-hit in a hungover haze? Of course not, since the Mick hit a home run, squinting out at the stands and muttering, “Those people don’t know how tough that really was.” But it was a big deal then. A half-century later, it all seems so tame in retrospect. The furor generated by Ball Four was immense, and it solidified Bouton’s reputation as a maverick, a renegade, a darling of the late 1960s counterculture and a player-turned-author who pulled no punches. He would finish his career with a 62-63 record, but it was his observations as a writer that would set Bouton apart. Bouton won 21 had games in 1963 and 18 the following year, plus a pair of World Series games, but by 1969 he was struggling to latch on with a major league team. ![]() As a knuckleball pitcher, that was the perfect analogy. My dog-eared pages of Ball Four, Jim Bouton’s diary of the 1969 major league season, would have made that assumption perfectly logical.īouton was a journeyman pitcher when he began taking notes in 1969, hanging on, as he wrote at the time, by his fingernails. My father claimed (incorrectly) it was the only book I ever read. ![]() A baseball book had never been so honest, so earthy, so profane. I first read it as a 13-year-old and was mesmerized. ![]()
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