Editor's note: In 1969, Jim Bouton was a former
World Series hero with the New York Yankees, now on
his last legs as a big leaguer and trying to survive with the expansion
Seattle Pilots as a knuckleball
pitcher. He kept a diary of the season, which he and collaborator Leonard
Schecter turned into the 1970 best seller "Ball Four." This
fall, Sports Publishing, Inc., will publish a special-edition hard-cover.
Back when he lived in a different house, Pirates assistant
general manager Roy Smith kept his copy of "Ball Four" in a prominent
place where he could always turn to its pages when he needed to look up
a bit of wisdom from Joe Schultz or Fred Talbot.
|
 |
| Although remembered for "Ball Four,"
Jim Bouton won two World Series games for the Yankees in 1964. |
"I kept it in the bathroom," Smith said. "That and 'The
Godfather.' That pretty much covered it all. What else do you need? Well,
I guess I could have had The Bible."
Perhaps. But does the Old Testament tell you how to play
for a manager whose advice for most any situation was generally limited
to "go pound some Budweiser"?
Smith estimates he's read "Ball Four" in its entirety
five times, which is about average. I know several people (myself included)
who read all or part of it every February as a spring training ritual. Just
as pitchers and catchers report to Florida and Arizona, fans report to the
pages of "Ball Four," the best book ever written about baseball.
It's in the many re-readings when you realize the full
depth of Jim Bouton's book, once described by David Halberstam as "a book
deep in the American vein, so deep it is by no means a sports book," and
a book that was officially named a couple years ago as one of the most important
of the century (alas, Warren Cromartie's book on his season in Japan was
somehow overlooked by the panel of judges).
Read "Ball Four" for the second time or the 22nd, and
you are sure to notice something you missed before. Particularly if you
first read it at age 12, when, as Smith said, "I didn't get all the jokes."
Ah, yes, those infamous, rawer portions of "Ball Four"
that dealt with late-night mischief and explaining to a wife "why she needed
a penicillin shot for your kidney infection." Those sections seem tame by
today's standards, yet they helped "Ball Four" achieve its notoriety as
a "tell-all" book. But to focus on the occasional passage about sex or even
Mickey Mantle's drunken behavior is to miss the book's essence. And to call
it simply a "tell-all" book is like describing "The Grapes of Wrath" as
a book about harvesting peaches in California.
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Key players on the '69 Pilots |
|
Player |
HR |
RBI |
BA |
|
Don Mincher, 1B |
25 |
78 |
.246 |
|
John Donaldson, 2B |
1 |
19 |
.234 |
|
Ray Oyler, SS |
7 |
22 |
.165 |
|
Tommy Harper, 3B |
9 |
41 |
.235 |
|
Steve Hovley, OF |
3 |
20 |
.277 |
|
Wayne Comer, OF |
15 |
54 |
.245 |
|
Tommy Davis, OF |
6 |
80 |
.271 |
|
Jerry McNertney, C |
8 |
55 |
.241 |
|
Mike Hegan, OF |
8 |
37 |
.292 |
|
Gus Gil, IF |
0 |
17 |
.222 |
|
Steve Whitaker, OF |
6 |
13 |
.250 |
|
John Kennedy, SS |
4 |
14 |
.234 |
|
Rich Rollins, IF |
4 |
21 |
.225 |
|
Ron Clark, IF |
0 |
12 |
.196 |
|
Merrit Ranew, C |
0 |
4 |
.247 |
|
Greg Goossen, 1B |
10 |
24 |
.309 |
|
Pitchers |
|
Player |
W |
L |
ERA |
|
Gene Brabender, R |
13 |
14 |
4.37 |
|
Diego Segui, R |
12 |
6 |
3.36 |
|
Marty Pattin, R |
7 |
12 |
5.60 |
|
Fred Talbot, R |
5 |
8 |
4.15 |
|
Steve Barber, L |
4 |
7 |
4.81 |
|
Bob Locker, R |
3 |
3 |
2.19 |
|
John Gelnar, R |
3 |
10 |
3.30 |
|
Mike Marshall, R |
3 |
10 |
5.11 |
|
Jim Bouton, R |
2 |
1 |
3.91 |
|
Gary Bell, R |
2 |
6 |
4.72 |
Yes, Bouton told us things we never knew about ballplayers,
but more importantly, he related them from an interesting, questioning and
thoroughly independent viewpoint. And that's where all the ensuing "Ball
Four'" ripoffs ("more revealing than 'Ball Four' ") fell short. Those books
claimed to tell all, but because they were so often "written" by dull, shallow
ballplayers they usually told nothing. Bouton didn't just take us inside
the clubhouse, he provided keen insight to the clubhouse.
The irony is baseball's most famous outsider wrote the
ultimate insider's book.
"Ball Four" also is more than a diary of Bouton's 1969
season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros, it is a vibrant, funny,
telling history of an era that seems even further away than three decades.
Bouton writes of negotiating his $22,000 contract, seven years before agents
and free agency. He worries about losing a $600 apartment deposit. He notices
the relations between blacks and whites in the clubhouse. He reports the
problems the Pilots' management had with Steve Hovley because of his long
hair and penchant for reading Dostoyevsky. Not just a diary of 1969 baseball,
it is a time capsule of American society in the sixties.
A time capsule, and yet, also timeless. Much of what
Bouton wrote still is true today; only the dollar figures have changed.
Further, Bouton had the amazing good fortune to write
about an expansion team that existed for one year and is otherwise lost
to time. He has described the 1969 Pilots as the Flying Dutchman of baseball,
a lost team claimed by neither the Brewers nor the Mariners, doomed to sail
aimlessly without a harbor. "They should hold the reunion game in the middle
of Montana," he once said.
Recently, I saw him compare the Pilots to the magical
village in "Brigadoon" that comes to life one day every 100 years. I like
that description better. The Pilots played just one magic summer, then disappeared
into the mists of baseball history.
Thanks to "Ball Four," however, we can simply take the
book down from the shelf, turn to a page and find Steve Hovley, Gene Brabender,
Joe Schultz and the rest of the boys alive, well and pounding the Budweiser.
Jim Caple is the national baseball writer for the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which has a website at www.seattle-pi.com.
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