As many of you know, I was on a little hiatus during which time Jim Bouton passed away.
There have been dozens of obituaries and accolades and I will not refer to them, save the few below; they’re easy enough to Google. But here’s my two cents.
It was almost ten years ago when Bouton agreed to be one of the first guests on what is now the Baseball Conversation podcast. I don’t remember exactly how that transpired, how I found his contact information (it may have been from his Big League Chew website) and worked up the nerve to contact him. And what a surprise that he would agree to do it. The result was so long that I had to chop it into three segments.
With all due respect to Jim Brosnan and jerry Kramer, Bouton (and his co-author Leonard Schechter, whom a lot of people seem to forget about) tore the literary cover off the ball, so to speak. Ball Four was to first to expose the human — of not always heroic — side of the game. Seems, ballplayers are just guys, looking up skirts and chasing women, getting drunk, taking drugs, and not always being so nice to their fans.
According to the NY Times‘ obituary by Bruce Weber,
[N]ot only was “Ball Four” an instant and enduring best seller; it also earned widespread recognition as a seminal text of sports literature. In 2002, Sports Illustrated placed it at No. 3 on its list of the top 100 sports books of all time. Perhaps more notable, in 1995, as the New York Public Library celebrated its centennial, it included “Ball Four” as the only sports book among 159 titles in its exhibit “Books of the Century.”
Bouton’s passing brought about renewed interest in his work. I’m sure younger readers picked up Ball Four and asked what the fuss was about. He took a lot of heat — a lot — from former teammates, from the Yankees, from then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Nevertheless, there’s no denying the impact Ball Four had on the literary world, as evidenced by its inclusion in various “best” and “most important” lists.
Jim Bouton, baseball pitcher whose ‘Ball Four’ gave irreverent peek inside the game, dies at 80
With today’s “tell-all” offerings, the steam has gone out of Ball Four. That’s all right. Relatively speaking this is “just a book,” not the discovery of penicillin (Alexander Fleming) or blood transfusion (Dr. Charles Drew) There are plenty of areas in which the first to break a barrier has been forgotten, but their legacy is still there.
is available on Amazon.com,
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