A TRIBUTE TO BOUTON
There’s so much more to Jim’s life story than his great book ‘Ball Four’
Jim Bouton, the irreverent Yankee who died at 80 Wednesday after a long battle with cerebral amyloid angiopathy, was a man of many layers. Criticized and ostracized by many of his former teammates after penning his seminal 1970 tell-all baseball book “Ball Four,” he was also a tireless crusader for ballplayers’ rights, an amateur painter, a political activist who joined a group of 65 (mostly African American) athletes voicing support of a boycott of the 1964 Olympic games in
Mexico City, and a savvy business entrepreneur who invented and patented “Big League Chew,” a gum alternative to chewing tobacco. Most of all, however, Bouton was a hopeless baseball romantic who could never quite let go of his dream to keep pitching in the big leagues, and, in later life, embarked on a mission to save historic 85-year old Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Mass.
Born in Newark, N.J., Bouton spent most of his youth in Ridgewood. When he was about to start high school, his father had a job change and moved the family to Chicago. He later credited the move, going from a sleepy, small town in New Jersey to a highly-competitive 3,400 population big city high school with a field house and a stadium, as the best thing that could have happened to him insofar as his development into a big league pitcher. The right-handed Bouton signed with the Yankees as an amateur free agent in December 1958, and with an already-established blazing fastball and curve, moved quickly through their farm system before arriving in the majors as a 21year old rookie in 1962. The
following year, he was second behind Whitey Ford in victories for the Yankees, with a 21-7 record and 2.53 ERA, and was named to the American League All-Star team.
Flush with instant success, Bouton held out that winter for a $20,000 raise and quickly ran afoul of Yankee general manager Ralph Houk, who’d been his manager in ’63. It was the first of many acrimonious contract negotiations Bouton had with the stern, old school “major” who’d been a combat hero in World War II and didn’t cotton to his young pitcher’s brash and irreverent nature. “Bouton and I didn’t get along,” Houk told me in a 2002 interview. “He was only for himself. He was the one guy I had who wasn’t a team player. I realized that in ’63 when he won the 21 games. There was a game in July when he had 1718 wins and I took him out after he got in a jam with a three-run lead. We wound up losing the game and afterward he made a remark to a reporter that I didn’t want him to win 20 games. He also said some bad things about Mickey (Mantle) in his book.”
Nicknamed “The Bulldog” for his pugnacious manner on the mound — he’d throw so hard his cap often fell off his head — Bouton off the field regaled in the role of “class clown” in the Yankee clubhouse with his imitations of “Crazy Guggenheim,” the popular character on the Jackie Gleason show at the time, and his pranks with fellow free spirit, Phil Linz. Bouton followed up his 21-win ’63 season with an 18-13 mark in ’64 and won two games against the Cardinals in the World Series.
Unfortunately for him, that
proved to be the highlight of his baseball career. In ’65 he developed a sore arm, going 4-15 with a 4.82 ERA, and never again regained the velocity in his fastball. He remained with the Yankees, pitching mostly out of the bullpen, until being traded to the expansion Seattle Pilots in August of 1969. His final record for barely 10 years in the majors was 62-63 with a 3.57 ERA.
It was while with the Pilots, Bouton decided to write a diary, modeled after a similar literary effort “The Long Season” by Cincinnati Reds reliever Jim Brosnan in 1960. Originally, Bouton had intended the diary to be a chronicle of his struggles to stay in the majors with an expansion team full of misfits by developing a knuckleball. But he couldn’t help venturing back to his Yankee days with tales out of school about his teammates’ boozing, pill popping and womanizing that shocked the baseball world and got him on the best-seller list along with a very public reprimand from Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. It was Kuhn, who probably had more to do with “Ball Four’s” runaway success (more than 5.5 million sold in print) than anyone when he called Bouton up to his office in midseason 1970 and demanded that he apologize and recant some of the stories. When Bouton refused, he became a martyr in the public’s eyes.
Much as Bouton later insisted “Ball Four” was really a tame book in comparison to some of the outrageous books written today, it was fair to say the Yankee management and his Yankee teammates did not appreciate tales of Mantle slamming the team bus window on kids seeking autographs and leading voyeurism missions with a telescope atop the Shoreham Hotel in Washington; or Yogi Berra hovering naked over the cold cut spread in the clubhouse, or the beloved and universally respected Elston Howard being depicted as a phony in one of the players’ meetings. As punishment for his tome, Bouton became a pariah around Yankee Stadium, never invited back to Old-Timers’ Day until 1998 after his son, Michael, wrote an impassioned letter in the New York Times pleading with Yankee owner George Steinbrenner to end his dad’s ban.
But after coming back to the Stadium for the first time in ’98 and receiving a huge ovation from the sellout Old Timers’ Day crowd, Bouton managed to antagonize Steinbrenner and the Yankee brass all over again a few years later by harshly criticizing the plan for the new Yankee Stadium that, in his view, was going to remove valuable parkland from a poor neighborhood. “I think former Yankees should not allow Steinbrenner to trash history,” Bouton told the Daily News. “They should lie down in front of the bulldozers. I’d join them myself although I’m not sure the bulldozers would stop in my case.”
Thirteen years after Bouton wrote “Ball Four,” his first wife, Bobbie, in conjunction with the wife of Bouton’s ’69 Pilots teammate, Mike Marshall, wrote their own book detailing the infidelities of their two husbands. To his credit, Bouton acknowledged his failings as a husband and getting caught up in his own fame. “A lot of guys have been faithful to their wives in baseball. It didn’t happen with me,” he said. “But I don’t think I can blame baseball. I don’t think I became more egotistical at 38. I was egotistical in the third grade.”
In the latter years of his life, Bouton endured tragedy and illness. On August 15, 1997, his daughter, Laurie, was killed in an accident on the Garden State Parkway
when the car in back of her rear-ended her at over 60 miles per hour. Exactly five years later, August 15, 2012, Bouton suffered a stroke, robbing him of his ability to speak, read or write the way he used to. “The body knows, you know?” Bouton told Tyler Kepner of the New York Times. A few years later it was revealed he was suffering from dementia. In the few public appearances he made, his second wife, Paula Kurman Bouton, was at his side, helping him with his speech and his memory. She survives him as do his two sons from his first marriage, Michael and David.