‘Ball Four’ threw high heat
Jerome Holtzman, the Hall of Fame baseball writer from Chicago who invented the save rule 60 years ago, decided late in life he wanted to sell his archives and declutter his Evanston home.
Holtzman, nicknamed “The Dean” by his fellow scribes, had a few thousand books in his third-story library, including many he wrote. They were meticulously catalogued by name and author on index cards and filed in alphabetical order.
Late in the 2007 season, Jerome informed me of his plan to sell his collection and asked me to pick a book from the library before he packed it up for the sale. So I went to his home, climbed the skinny staircase to the third floor and began looking over the many titles.
After an hour of perusing, I finally made my choice, pulling a book off the shelf and showing it to The Dean.
“I’ll take this one,” I said. Jerome’s face sank when he saw the book I selected. He never could hide his emotions.
“‘Ball Four’?” he said. “Halberstam. Updike. Red Smith. All these great writers to choose from, and you want ‘Ball Four?’ ”
“Ball Four,” which came out in May 1970, was a tell-all written by major-league pitcher Jim Bouton, detailing his 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros.
Bouton, who died Wednesday after battling a brain disease for years, basically committed career suicide at age 31 by revealing the inner secrets of the baseball clubhouse, destroying the myth of AllAmerican boy Mickey Mantle and discussing the proliferation of “greenies,” or amphetamines.
The book became a bestseller and made Bouton famous, tearing the cover off the sport during the turbulent early ’70s. I told Jerome I had read “Ball Four” as a kid and really enjoyed it but would pick another one if he wanted.
Jerome insisted I keep it since that was the one I chose, even as he made it clear it was absolutely the wrong choice. When we got downstairs, I asked his wife, Marilyn, to take a photo of us and the book.
Jerome still couldn’t hide his disgust that I selected a book written by a baseball player instead of an actual writer. He died in 2008, and every time I look at the photo, it reminds me how disappointed he was.
When I got home that day, I opened the book and saw a handwritten message from Bouton: “Best wishes to Jerry Holtzman — a helluva writer and a great guy. One of the truth sayers. ‘Smoke ’em inside.’ ”
No, it wasn’t David Halberstam, John Updike or Red Smith. “Ball Four” was salacious and funny, and it exposed players as human, which is why Bouton became a pariah with some of his peers. A common mantra in clubhouses is “What’s said here stays here.”
But Bouton’s book, reported in secret and written in diary form, broke all the rules. It was so controversial, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to get him to sign a statement saying the book was fiction. He refused, of course.
But as the years went on, “Ball Four” eventually was acknowledged as one of the greatest sports books ever, and the New York Public Library even named it as one of the best books, period, of the 20th century.
Since “Ball Four” there have been many tell-all books from sports figures, including Jose Canseco’s “Juiced,” a raw account of the steroid era that named names and left him with the reputation as baseball’s biggest snitch.
Even Commissioner Bud Selig has written a tell-all, “For the Good of the Game,” which was released this month and includes private conversations with owners and other executives who surely never thought they would wind up in a book, much less one written by Selig.
It’s not nearly as juicy as “Juiced” or as interesting as “Ball Four.” But it proves that the adage “What’s said here stays here” no longer applies when someone feels the urge to cash in on old stories for a memoir.
Bouton’s book changed the way a 12year-old kid looked at ballplayers, but it didn’t make me dislike them or the game. If anything it made the game and its players more interesting. After three decades of covering baseball, I know firsthand that players are no different than the rest of us, albeit much richer.
Perhaps one of today’s players will one day write his own version of “Ball Four,” though it probably wouldn’t have the same impact as the original. Nothing can really shock us about athletes now, even as they try to shape their image on Instagram and The Players’ Tribune.
They’re still human. Some are jerks in private while maintaining a nice-guy persona, like Mantle and others depicted in “Ball Four.” Bouton, the game’s first real “truth sayer,” made us realize the idea of the perfect baseball player was a myth.
That’s as true now as it was 50 years ago.