Ball Four author Bouton changed sports coverage
Jim Bouton, a pitcher of modest achievement but a celebrated iconoclast who left a lasting mark on baseball as the author of “Ball Four,” a raunchy, shrewd, irreverent — and bestselling — player’s diary that tainted the game’s wholesome image, died Wednesday at his home in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. He was 80.
He died after a long struggle with vascular dementia, said his wife, Paula Kurman. Bouton had a stroke in 2012, and in 2017 he revealed he had a brain disease called cerebral amyloid angiopathy.
When it was published in 1970, “Ball Four,” which reported on the selfishness, dopiness, childishness and mean-spiritedness of young men often lionized for playing a boy’s game very well, was viewed by many readers, approvingly or not, as a betrayal of the so-called sanctity of the clubhouse.
But the book, which was Bouton’s account of the 1969 Major League Baseball season, seven years after his big league debut with the New York Yankees, had a larger narrative — namely his attempt, at age 30, to salvage a once-promising career by developing the game’s most peculiar and least predictable pitch: the knuckleball.
In the book, the pitch becomes a metaphor for Bouton’s view of himself as an eccentric fellow in a baseball society of conservative go-alongs, stubbornly following his own path and yet dependent on the whimsy of outside forces.
Some reviewers recognized the ardour and the poignant tension in Bouton’s tale. In The New Yorker, Roger Angell described “Ball Four” as “a rare view of a highly complex public profession seen from the innermost inside, along with an even more rewarding inside view of an ironic and courageous mind. And, very likely, the funniest book of the year.”
But for most readers, Bouton’s personal predicament was overwhelmed by what he revealed about life in the major leagues.
In Bouton’s telling, players routinely cheated on their wives on road trips, devised intricate plans to peek under women’s skirts or spy on them through hotel windows, spoke in casual vulgarities, drank to excess and swallowed amphetamines as if they were M&Ms.