Ball Four

I liked this book when I read it as a kid. I loved it when I went back to it as an adult, when I was able to better appreciate Bouton’s irreverence, character insights, and skewering of authority.

There’s a reason this memoir of his 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots has become a classic. Bouton holds nothing back in letting us know what it’s like to be a professional ballplayer from the inside.

Jim Bouton broke baseball’s code of silence to write this tell-all memoir about life in the Major Leagues.

What’s shocking is how good it is: how fun, readable, and thoughtful. There are salacious stories about drug use, Mickey Mantle, and many varieties of barbaric and knuckleheaded behavior.

But the heart of the story is about a fading star trying to reinvent himself as a knuckleballer—and then, in a much later addendum, coping with the death of a child.

This ballplayer can write.

My go-to baseball book, one that I’ve read twice and listened to twice, which I particularly enjoyed because Bouton reads the audio version. This is the baseball book that changed everything – well, it definitely changed baseball autobiographies and our expectations of them. There are parts that make me cringe, parts that would never pass the “politically correct” test today.

Regardless, what comes through most for me is Bouton’s wit and observations of the game and its players, and what it’s really like to play baseball at its highest level. Also, his love for the game and its grip on… show more.

Before the 1970 publication of Bouton’s riotous tell-all account of his not-quite-stellar career as a major league pitcher, baseball players were largely depicted as clean-living exemplars of American Manhood.  That all changed with Ball Four. While ostensibly a diary of his 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots (who were later to become the Milwaukee Brewers) and the Houston Astros, Bouton’s tell-all autobiography also provides plenty of anecdotes from his years playing for the legendary New York Yankees. Bouton’s revelations of substance abuse (he ‘outed’ the great Mickey Mantle as an alcoholic), compulsive womanizing and rampant cheating were so scandalous… show more.