‘Ball Four’ author Jim Bouton dies

Pitcher who shook up the baseball world with his tell-all memoir of the 1969 season was 80.

Pitcher took readers inside the locker room and shook up baseball with memoir of 1969 season.

GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — Jim Bouton, the former New York Yankees pitcher who shocked and angered the conservative baseball world with the tell-all book “Ball Four,” died. He was 80.

Bouton’s family said he died Wednesday at the home he shared with wife, Paula Kurman. He fought a brain disease linked to dementia and was in hospice care. Bouton also had two strokes in 2012.

Published in 1970, “Ball Four” detailed Yankees great Mickey Mantle’s carousing and the use of stimulants in the major leagues. Bouton’s revealing look at baseball off the field made for eye-opening and entertaining reading, but he paid a big price for the bestseller when former teammates, other players and executives across the big leagues ostracized him for exposing their secrets.

Before “Ball Four,” other athletes had written books chronicling the inner world of professional sports. But Bouton’s bawdy, unexpurgated view from the clubhouse was a breakthrough.

“Ball Four” is “arguably the most inf luential baseball book ever written,” baseball historian Terry Cannon told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2005, “and one which changed the face of sportswriting and our conception of what it means to be a professional athlete.”

Throwing so hard that his cap flew off his head, Bouton was 21-8 with six shutouts in 1963 and went 18-13 with four more shutouts in 1964. The Yankees lost the World Series both years, with Bouton losing his lone start in 1963 in New York’s loss to the Dodgers, and winning twice the following year in the Yankees’ loss to the St. Louis Cardinals.

Bouton injured his right arm in 1965, going 4-15 that season, and had limited playing time the next three seasons with New York. He worked on “Ball Four” in 1969, a season spent with the expansion Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros, his fastball replaced by a knuckleball.

Bouton also pitched for Houston in 1970, and made a comeback with the Atlanta Braves in 1978, going 1-3 at age 39. He finished his 10year career with a 62-63 record and 3.57 ERA.

Bouton was a television sportscaster in New York City and starred in a 1976 CBS sitcom based on “Ball Four” that lasted only five episodes. He and a former teammate developed Big League Chew.