* Review: Ball Four

A blast from the past courtesy of the Lansing State Journal.

Upshot:

…[O]ne book is not responsible for the seismic shift in sports media during the past 40 years, or even the past five years. But it’s part of it, and Bouton’s book is among the first insights that the game, the strategy and the personnel who make up baseball haven’t changed so much as the relationship with anyone outside of their immediate world has.

Happy Birthday, Jim Bouton

Not the first — that honor went to Jim Brosnan — but perhaps the best of the genre he tackled, Bouton turns 69 today.

“The Bulldog” enjoyed a couple of good years for the New York Yankees, winning 20 games in1963 and 18 more in 1964, the last good year the team had for more than a decade (coincidence?). Then the arm problems set in and he started the downhill slide. He was purchased by the Seattle Pilots after the 1968 season, pitched for them a little while trying to develop a knuckleball, and was traded to the Houston Astros towards the end of the ‘69 season. It was during this tumultuous year that he began keeping notes with the idea of writing an “insider’s book” on the game. The result, as any literate baseball fans knows, was Ball Four.

When the book was published, Bouton was looked upon as a pariah by many traditionalists, including old-school baseball writers like Dick Young of The New York Daily News and others who considered him a traitor to the brotherhood of players and the image of baseball. But that just fueled his fire.He followed up Ball Four with I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally, something of a sequel. He also wrote I Managed Good, But Boy Did They Play Bad, revisited Ball Four with additional material about his comeback attempt with the Atlanta Braves in 1978 at the age of 39, after an absence of eight years.

There are few players who will match Bouton’s legacy. He may not have enjoyed as brilliant a playing career as some of his major league brethren, but his literary accomplishments more than make up for it.

The Amazon Report:

Other books by Jim Bouton include:

Ball Four

I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally.

Ball Four My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues

I Managed Good, but Boy did they Play Bad

Foul Ball - My Life And Hard Times Trying To Save An Old Ballpark

Strike Zone, a novel, written with Elliot Asinof, author of Eight Men Out

Quote of the week

From Jim Caple’s Page 2 column on ESPN.com:

Rereading “Ball Four” every spring…is an annual requirement — sort of like pitchers’ fundamental drills, only a lot more fun.

Bits and pieces

PinstripesPA reviews Haunted Baseball by Dan Gordon and Mickey Bradley, while Tailgatecrashers post this piece about The New Ballgame: Baseball Statistics for the Casual Fan, by Glenn Guzzo.

As the days go by and more attention is paid to the use of amphetamines and other drugs associated with easing ADD/ADHD, Jim Bouton’s Ball Four will enjoy a renewed interest. Bouton broke the code of the lockerroom by writing about drug use way back in 1970.

The ethics of friendship

Of late, I have wondered about the ethics of friendship. I’ve been watching The Wire, a cop /newspaper drama in which people do questionable things for ostensibly noble purposes.

In one episode, a superior officer chastises a patrolman for an unquestionably wrong act against a citizen who honked his horn at a crime scene. Although this sergeant was once a contemporary of the cop, he refused to back him up in this case.

Which leads, in a roundabout way, to Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte.

The relationship between these two athletes has been written about extensively. Clemens and Pettitte are almost joined at the hip. It was Clemens who helped his friend decide to return to the Yankees. No doubt they have had deep conversations over the years.

But Pettitte, a self-proclaimed Christian athlete, must answer to a higher authority in the wake of recent steroid news. In fact, many sports pundits agree it’s Pettitte’s testimony, not Brian McNamee’s, that could pose the greater harm to Clemens’ situation.

The New York Times’ Mireya Navarro, contributed this piece on the Pettitte-Clemens friendship and refers to another athlete-cum-writer considered a pariah by many of his peers:

Jim Bouton, a pitcher and the author of the 1970 baseball memoir, “Ball Four,” said men become “like family and you stick up for each other.”

When his book exposed amphetamine use, heavy drinking and fighting among players, Mr. Bouton was labeled a Benedict Arnold by the baseball establishment, some ex-teammates and the press, but he never considered his book an act of betrayal.

“There are things I didn’t put in the book because I thought they’d violate the players’ confidences too much,” said Mr. Bouton, explaining that his goal had been to share what it was like to be a ballplayer, which he was with the Yankees and the Seattle Pilots. He described the experience as mostly “fun.”

“I did hold back,” he said. “It’s a tell-some book.”