Ball Four: The Final Pitch
Author: Jim Bouton
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 097091170X
Pages: 465
Summary: Jim Bouton's account of his 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and the Houston Astros is still the best baseball book ever written.

Ralph Houk says Ball Four is mostly lies. Johnny Sain says that knowing Jim Bouton was one of the highlights of his career. Max Soriano, vice president of the 1969 Seattle Pilots, says that Bouton was telling baseball tales that should not be repeated out of the locker room (although he is very careful not to deny anything Bouton wrote). Then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn said Bouton had done baseball "a grave disservice." Neither Phil Rizzuto nor Tom Tresh read the book, but they both say nice things about Bouton today.

It's hard today to read Ball Four and imagine the uproar it caused upon publication in 1970. We're certainly more jaded about professional athletes today than the average fan was in 1970: by and large the public image of athletes was controlled by teams and complicit newspaper reporters who didn't have the wherewithal to print the truth about what pro athletes did off the field.

Ball Four is a diary of Jim Bouton's 1969 season spent with the expansion Seattle Pilots and the Houston Astros. At that time, Bouton was regarded as being a washed-up pitchers whose glory days with the New York Yankees were behind him. His arm blown out, Bouton willed himself to become a knuckleball pitcher and ended up catching on with the expansion 1969 Seattle Pilots -- a shot that he accurately perceived to be his last chance to return to the major leagues and Yankee Stadium.

This is not a true baseball book, as it transcends such a narrow viewpoint. Much of what's interesting in Ball Four comes from Bouton's perspective as a outsider -- not only a baseball outsider, but a self-identified outsider in all aspects of life. He freely admits he was never one of the boys in the clubhouse. When he was a 20-game winner for the Yankees in 1963, this eccentricity was tolerated; when he lost his fastball, he was dumped by the Yankees and spent time in the minors before catching on with the expansion Seattle Pilots in 1969. The Pilots are one of the sadder stories in baseball: the team spent only a year in Seattle, playing in a decrepit minor-league stadium and losing wads of money before being plucked out of bankruptcy court by Bud Selig, becoming the Milwaukee Brewers just days before the 1970 season opener. Like any expansion team, the Pilots were a ragtag collection of castoffs and prospects, but the team was surprisingly successful early in the season before fading in the stretch.

Today, much of what was shocking in 1970 seems like the innocent escapades of yesteryear. When Bouton tells about the players gathering on the rooftops of hotels to spy on women in their hotel rooms, it seems more like Porky's than Sodom and Gomorrah. Baseball wasn't the business it was today: players were generally underpaid and constantly griping about team management come contract time. It's almost a given that a pro ballplayer isn't faithful to his wife. And when compared to the host of drugs that made their way through pro-baseball ranks in the 1980s and 1990s, players downing "greenies" seems somewhat quaint. But Ball Four did change all the rules: whereas Mickey Mantle occasionally admitted to having a postgame beer or two when asked in the 1960s, after Ball Four he -- and most other pro athletes -- freely admitted to being an alcoholic later in his life and wrote openly about drinking himself under the table throughout most of his career. Today, when Jose Canseco threatens a tell-all book about his steroid use, it pales in comparison to the fuss Bouton created in 1970.

So if the details aren't shocking, why read Ball Four today? 

Because it's an amazing chronicle of one man's striving for redemption. In the larger picture, Bouton spent the 1969 season trying to regain the magic that put him in the center of the baseball world at Yankee Stadium. He's smart enough to know that he's lost the magic, but not smart enough to see the path back -- and he's madder than hell that he can't envision the right path. So he takes it out on his family, his teammates, the locker-room door, and more. Sometimes you get the feeling that Bouton feels superior to all but a few teammates and coaches -- only Mike Marshall, Steve Hovley and Johnny Sain are considered true equals --and he's palpably upset that he can't will himself back into Yankee Stadium. Even though Bouton is a member of the Pilots, the spirit of the Yankees infuses his diary: he is both fascinated by and repulsed by Mickey Mantle, and his distaste of the Yankees and how the team did business is counterbalanced by a burning desire to wear the pinstripes again and hear the cheers at Yankee Stadium. This book is borne of that frustration. 

So Bouton's path ended up taking him back into the minor leagues, Seattle, and Houston. It also took him through a second career as an inventor (he and a friend came up with Big League Chew, the bubble gum shredded like chewing tobacco) and an author, although a sequel to Ball Four and a novel never came close to the success of Ball Four.

There is a happy ending to this tale of redemption. Today, he's a successful inspirational speaker and inventor. And he's finally one of the boys: in 1998 he was finally invited to Old Timers' Day in Yankee Stadium, returning to Yankee Stadium after a 30-year absence. Baseball's ultimate outsider was back inside the Yankee Stadium dugout -- the end point of an amazing odyssey.

There are a few books I make a point of rereading every few years: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Henry James' The Awkward Age chief among them. I first read Ball Four as a teenager in central Minnesota, and I had not looked it again until a 12-hour flight from Singapore to Minneapolis earlier this month -- too long a gap between readings, a problem I will remedy by revisiting Ball Four every two years. If you've never read Ball Four, you must: it's a classic tale of what happens behind the scenes in baseball, and today it's a marvelous snapshot of the last innocent era in major-league sports. --Kevin Reichard

Related Links

Jim Bouton's Web Site

Jim Bouton's Ball Four Page

Ball Four Book

Seattle Pilots History

Dr. Mike Marshall's Home Page

The Baseball Reliquary: Jim Bouton

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