Radical baseball book left this young rebel in stitches
I’m zooming back to 1970. Home economics class. Which I loathed. Girls had to take home ec, and boys had to take shop. Although there were boys who wanted to sew and girls who wanted to make bird houses, that’s just how things rolled then.
Mrs. B, our home ec teacher, who was tipsy and grumpy pretty much every day, decided we would make these things called house coats. Supposedly, women wore them around the house. They were like robes but lighter.
My mother never wore a house coat, no one I knew wore a house coat, and if there was anything I wanted to make less enthusiastically than a house coat, I can’t imagine what it would have been.
I wanted to make the baseball team. Of course, girls couldn’t even try to do that.
Seventh grade. A terrible, horrible, no- good, very bad time. And yet ... there was “Ball Four.”
It had just come out. I got a copy and carried it to school in my satchel the next day because I had started it at home and knew I couldn’t go all day without sneaking peeks at it.
The task at hand, though, was to make something recognizable out of a sheet of hot pink fabric imprinted with big groovy flowers of orange, green and red. I distinctly remember the hot pink, a color that added to the punishment.
“Ball Four” was whispering to me from my satchel, Mrs. B was barking instructions and I was trying to make sense of the cutouts I had made. There was the piece that would be the back and a piece that would be the front. There was a notch for a sleeve and a piece that looked like a sleeve.
I felt frustrated and resistant to this assignment. Even at 12, I knew life was short.
I bunched the fabric into a mound, reached into my satchel, hid the paperback behind the fabric and flipped to the bookmark.
My friend, Ann, was sitting beside me. She threw me a glance, a panicked look on her face: What
are you doing!? Because we were good girls, good students, dutiful, responsible.
But the rebel inside me sometimes stepped out, and in that case, I had Jim Bouton to thank.
His death last week at age 80 prompted the most vivid memory I have from the confines of junior high school.
Mr. Bouton is remembered for writing “Ball Four,” the best- selling tell- all about his experiences in the major leagues. He had come up with the New York Yankees as a pitcher and won 21 games for them in 1963, but his ascendancy was cut short by an injury that impaired his fastball.
When he slid into the scrapheap that was the Seattle Pilots, a short- lived expansion team that became the Milwaukee Brewers, he found the fodder for the raunchiest, most hilarious, scathing and revealing sendup of baseball that has ever been written.
Mr. Bouton was baseball’s equivalent of Daniel Ellsberg, and he took awful heat from the pious protectors of our pastime’s image for ripping the seams from around its secrets. Sex, drugs and rockin’ bad boys. None of the outrage, as I recall, came from women who might have considered the antics of the players despicable. To a 12- year- old, the book’s sheer orneriness was a delight.
I was in the middle of a devious dugout scene when Mrs. B, who shook like a loose muffler, yelled, “Miss Jones, what is so amusing!”
I slipped the book under my leg and thought fast. Well, of course! My house coat was. I made it seem like I was chuckling at how it looked and told her I had no idea what to make of it.
She came over and appraised my effort. Raising the garish concoction, then shaking it, she looked at me in disgust and snarled, “You sewed a sleeve onto the neck.”
Many of my classmates stifled giggles. Ann, loyally, remained stony.
Mrs. B went off to help more promising seamstresses and I retrieved the book. I had taken my position. I would not stitch. And it was clear that, had I been on third with the bases loaded, Mrs. B would have conceded the run.
When I see Ann these days, we recall the episode. It happened over one or two days. She remembers that we ended up passing the book back and forth openly, emboldened by Mrs. B’s lack of interest and by a much bigger world of audacity.