I turned eight in the spring of 1968 and in the summer I became a baseball fan. During that same spring and summer, the nation was torn apart like no time since the Civil War. So, baseball did for me then what it has always done; even though eight year-olds typically don’t get too worked up over the problems of the larger world.
When I was 10, Jim Bouton published Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues (1970). The book documents Bouton’s 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots: a Major League Baseball expansion team cobbled together in large part from the cast-offs of MLB’s other teams. For Jim Bouton, it was an opportunity to reclaim his brief moments of baseball glory from his time with the New York Yankees.*
In 1963, the hard-throwing pitcher with a “real big overhand curveball that once made me famous” helped carry his team to the World Series with 21 wins and only 7 losses. While his regular season record slipped in 1964 to 18-13, Bouton won both of his World Series starts, including a crucial Game 6 victory that tied the series 3-3; only to see the Yankees lose the series in Game 7.
Over the following four seasons Bouton won a combined total of nine games. His arm was shot.
So, when he left the Yankees to join the Seattle Pilots after the 1968 season, he wondered if his time was up. But this is a baseball story and Bouton opens with, “I’m 30 years old and I have these dreams.”
Bolstering those dreams was the success that a handful of other pitchers were having with the knuckleball. Gripped with the fingertips instead of the palm, a well-thrown knuckler will not spin. As the raised seams of the ball catch the wind, the ball dances around in unpredictable ways; making it extremely difficult to hit. It can also have the tendency to dance out of the strike zone. And, when a knuckleball is not thrown very well—meaning it spins—then a lot of these balls get bashed around and out of the park.
Since the knuckleball need not be thrown very hard to be effective, an aging pitcher with an injured arm might be able to pitch much more frequently and without further damage from decades of abuse. Such is the stuff that a 30-year-old’s baseball dreams are made of.
Ball Four is Jim Bouton’s day-to-day journal of his 1969 season, replete with uncensored anecdotes and personal commentary that uncovered the gritty and crudely hilarious realities of the life of a Major League ballplayer.
New York sportswriter Leonard Shecter had pioneered a behind-the-scenes—and extremely controversial—approach to baseball writing. During his time covering the Yankees, Shecter befriended Bouton as a fellow free-thinking iconoclast who tended to say things as he saw them.
In 1968, Shecter approached Bouton about writing a book detailing his upcoming season with the Pilots—or whatever other team he might end up with. “’Funny you should mention that,’ [Bouton] said when [Shecter] first brought it up. ‘I’ve been taking some notes.’”
Most of the ballplayers of Bouton’s era were signed on to minor league clubs out of high school. Some had graduated, some had not. By the time they reached the majors, many of them had lived within the broader culture of “ballplayer” since they were 14 or 15 years old. Many of the characters of Ball Four, then, were living an extended adolescence well into their twenties. Alcohol, drugs, sex, and risk-taking define many of these lives as much as the game itself. “Being a professional athlete,” Bouton writes, “allows you to postpone your adulthood. You grow up in Heroworld. Parents change the dinner schedule for you, teachers help with grades, coaches fawn over you, cops ask for an autograph and someone else buys the drinks.”
The result is that many of this rag-tag group of Seattle Pilots would find that the unfiltered accounts of their adolescence-inspired behavior wound up in the hands of millions of baseball-loving Americans. Many players drank excessively, especially when playing on the road. Famously, Bouton told a few stories of Yankee slugger Mickey Mantle’s heavy drinking. Several of Bouton’s most hilarious stories involve late-night adventures one might expect when testosterone-driven males gather in groups with little supervision and some cash in their pockets.
Athletic young men also tended to attract women who were smitten with the idea of seducing a ballplayer. One story is told of a woman in Chicago who openly greeted the players from visiting teams. And since Chicago is home to both the Cubs of the National League and the White Sox of the American League, every single Major League player would visit the Windy City during the course of a season.
For most players on a Major League team, a great deal of time is spent watching the game rather than playing in it. This is especially true for pitchers who wile away their time in the bullpen hoping for a chance to pitch an inning or two. With all this free time, players engaged in a salacious activity sometimes enhanced with binoculars (that’s all I’m willing to say about this one).
Players regularly used “greenies,” an amphetamine widely available and heavily used throughout the league. This was not necessarily an illicit activity so much as it was a case of “everyone else is doing it.” During a game with the Cincinnati Reds, a Pilot hitter shot a ball into short right field. Outfielder Pete Rose dove for it and came up just a few inches short of catching it. One of the Pilots in the dugout said, “Five more milligrams and he’d have had it.”
Once it became obvious to everyone that Bouton was writing a book—he carried around a journal and pencil—a few players became a little testy. During games with Cincinnati, Bouton writes, “I can still remember Pete Rose, on the top step of the dugout screaming, “F*** you, Shakespeare.”
I lived in Cincinnati at the time and I saw Pete Rose play many times and everybody in town loved Pete Rose. Should I think less of him now that I know he was jacked up on drugs or that he was later banished from baseball for gambling on the games? I’m not sure I really know how to answer that.
Once the book was published, many of the players Bouton wrote about in Ball Four were incensed. So great was the publicity, more than a few spouted off to Bouton even though they hadn’t even read the book. This was true among those who were not even mentioned by name as Bouton was widely chastised for violation of a code of honor. Posted in MLB dugouts across the country were signs that read, “What you see here, what you say here, what you do here, let it stay here.” In an era when the norms of social behavior were being transformed, it was Jim Bouton who made a few people wonder if baseball still should be associated with “apple pie and Chevrolets.”
However, when Bouton attempted a comeback years later, he encountered many young players who had read Ball Four as teenagers and tended to thank Bouton for letting them know what to expect in the Big Leagues.
It would be easy enough to make personal judgments about the characters in Ball Four yet, for me, I like to think that my attitude toward other people is best summed up with “live and let live.” With that said, it’s pretty clear that much of Ball Four reports some pretty reprehensible behavior and I certainly do not recommend the book for anyone who sees it this way. On the other hand, Ball Four exposes the truth about baseball at that time and the book didn’t cause that behavior; it just revealed it.
Yes, many of the grown men of Ball Four behaved badly. I’m not necessarily condoning the bad behavior because men throughout history under similar circumstances have done pretty much the same. So, for me, to laugh at the drunken exploits is to laugh at an essential truth of the human experience. The alternative, in my view anyway, is found in the reaction of baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn upon the release of Ball Four in 1970. He called Jim Bouton into his office where he insisted that the book was bad for baseball and demanded that he renounce it all as a monumental lie. Bouton refused.
Ball Four is not just about drugs, alcohol, and sex; even as these are the stories that upset so many people. Bouton provides enlightening commentary on the idea of hero worship. He generally offers that if you worship someone like a ballplayer, you diminish yourself. This is something my mother questioned me about long ago during my own adolescence. “How can we live in a society,” she asked, “that admires baseball players more than brain surgeons?” I think the answer lives somewhere in that part of me that still relishes the care-free audacity of middle class adolescence; where farts are still funny, risk-taking is more adventurous than dangerous, and the prospect of death is an abstraction.
In the bigger picture, Bouton philosophized about the perils of a society that celebrates heroes when perhaps the better society would be one in which heroes are not necessary. Much of the journaling in this vein involved Bouton’s conversations with only a handful of other players able to ponder such things. For most of these guys, Bouton was seen as a nutcase or, when sharing some of his progressive views on civil rights and Vietnam, a communist.
OK, if a communist is someone who speaks up for the handful of Black players in the recently integrated game, so be it. In his prime with the Yankees, Bouton and left-handed pitcher Al Downing were displayed on a baseball trading card titled “Young Aces.” In 1964, the scene captured on this priceless card reveals a rare warmth between two Yankee pitchers unconcerned with race.
As to Vietnam, Bouton writes, [I was] “troubled by the stiff-minded emphasis on the flag that grips the country these days. A flag, after all, is still only a cloth symbol. You don’t show patriotism by showing blank-eyed love for a bit of cloth. And you can be deeply patriotic without covering your car with flag decals.”
Unsurprisingly, Bouton flouted many of the rules and norms of the club. He didn’t like that the team limited the times when players could sign autographs. Bouton famously signed for just about anyone who asked. He didn’t care for the idea of a curfew for players who liked to party into the night. In a lighthearted moment, as Bouton writes, a kid “wandered out of the stands and into the bullpen tonight and I grabbed him, put a warm-up jacket and a hat on him and sat him on the bench.” When the surly bullpen coach told Bouton he was breaking the rules, Bouton said, “This kid’s got good stuff and we may need him later in the inning.” If that kid had been me, I imagine I would have told that story a thousand times.
Perhaps the most profound impact of Ball Four came from the manner in which he wrote of baseball salaries and the contract negotiating process between players and owners. Within the next decade after its publication, this relationship changed dramatically.
On November 15, 1968, Bouton wrote, “I signed my contract today to play for the Seattle Pilots at a salary of $22,000…” In 2024, the average salary for a Major League Baseball Player is over $4,600,000. Suffice to say that the life of a Major Leaguer in 1969 is quite a bit different from that of a Major Leaguer today. So, reading Ball Four today, I have realized it is a book about the world of baseball I fell in love with; one which no longer exists.
For someone who considers himself an avid reader, I am surprised that it took me so long getting around to Ball Four. It’s been sitting on my shelf since my dad passed away several years ago. It had been sitting on his shelf for quite a while as well, one of those books you keep long after reading. I think the book touched him just as it touched me, even though it took some petty shots at his beloved Yankees. One of the most memorable lines in the book had become his line. When talking about homosexuality, my dad always joked, “Well, it doesn’t make you a bad person.” I was bowled over when those words jumped off the page.
When I first opened Ball Four a few weeks ago, I was pleased to see that it bore the autograph of Jim Bouton himself. So, now the old book pulsed with an energy borne of having been held by the author himself, the same fingertips that gripped all those knuckleballs.
In his passionate final sentence, Bouton writes, “You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end, it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
I never played Major League baseball but I believe I still have a small sense of Jim Bouton’s love of the game. Ball Four was being put to paper during the same season that the boy I once was came to love baseball. I cannot help but reflect on those childhood memories at a time in life when one’s sense of self is only beginning to emerge. And since then, that sense of self has always been touched by the specter of baseball; the green grass of spring knocking back the cold of winter while proclaiming boldly a fresh start for everyone, for everything.
*My copy of the book is titled Ball Four: Final Pitch which includes some great photographs and three epilogues from 1981, 1990, and 2000.
