Yankees
JIM BOUTON | March 8, 1939 - July 10, 2019
Pitcher Jim Bouton, who was a 20- game winner, spent 10 years in the big leagues and made an impact as the author of the groundbreaking book “Ball Four,” died from a brain disease linked to dementia. He was 80. See Obituary,
Jim Bouton, a once- promising pitcher with the New York Yankees who found greater fame as the author of “Ball Four,” an irreverent, bestselling book that angered baseball’s hierarchy and changed the way journalists and fans viewed the sports world, died Wednesday at his home in Great Barrington, Mass. He was 80.
He had a stroke in 2012 and five years later disclosed he had been diagnosed with cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a condition that causes vessels in the brain to burst under pressure. The death was confirmed by his wife, Paula Kurman.
Mr. Bouton was a hardthrowing right- hander who won 21 games for the Yankees in 1963 and 18 the following season, helping lead his team to the World Series both years.
After an arm injury, he lost his fastball and was relegated to the minor leagues before trying to revive his career as a knuckleball pitcher.
Mr. Bouton had often regaled listeners with tales of his antics in baseball, and as he sought to make the roster of the 1969 Seattle Pilots, he decided to take notes.
“Ball Four” — the title was suggested by a woman who overheard Mr. Bouton talking about his project in a bar — was published in 1970, with the help of sportswriter Leonard Shecter.
It was in the form of a seasonlong diary and was modeled in part on “The Long Season,” a 1960 book by bigleague pitcher Jim Brosnan. But no one had ever captured the humor, profanity and pathos of a major- league clubhouse with the candor that Mr. Bouton did in “Ball Four.”
“When I made it to the Yankees,” he told the New York Times in 1983, “it was like walking in this wonderland, this crazy place … With ‘ Ball Four,’ I never meant to make an investigation of a subculture. I just wanted to share the nonsense.”
When excerpts appeared in Look magazine, guardians of baseball’s traditions — including sportswriters, players and executives — were aghast. Mr. Bouton had broken baseball taboos, they fumed, revealing that players cheated on their wives, took amphetamines, drank to excess and cursed with abandon.
Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn wanted “Ball Four” banned and summoned Mr. Bouton to his office, demanding that he repudiate his own book.
Mr. Bouton refused to change a word, and the publicity helped make “Ball Four” one of the bestselling sports books of all time, with more than 5.5 million copies in print.
In Harper’s magazine, author David Halberstam called “Ball Four” a “book deep in the American vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book.”
Nonetheless, Mr. Bouton was often vilified by hidebound sportswriters and ballplayers. During a game, Cincinnati Reds star Pete Rose shouted his review from the dugout: “F--- you, Shakespeare!”
Before “Ball Four,” other athletes, including Brosnan and football player Jerry Kramer, had written books chronicling the inner world of professional sports. But Mr. Bouton’s bawdy, unexpurgated view from the clubhouse was a breakthrough.
“Ball Four” is “arguably the most influential 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.”
Sports Illustrated named it the third- best book ever written on sports, after A. J. Liebling’s “The Sweet Science” about boxing, and Roger Kahn’s elegy to the Brooklyn Dodgers, “The Boys of Summer.”
Some of Mr. Bouton’s most scandalous revelations concerned his former team, including Yankee superstar Mickey Mantle, who could be churlish and mean behind his country- boy grin.
“I’ve seen him close a bus window on kids trying to get his autograph,” Bouton wrote.
Players devised elaborate ways of spying on women, including drilling holes in dugout walls and crawling across rooftops to peep through hotel windows. Washington’s Shoreham Hotel was a particularly choice location.
“One of the first big thrills I had with the Yankees was joining about half the club on the roof of the Shoreham at two- thirty in the morning,” Bouton wrote. “I remember saying to myself, ‘ So this is the big leagues.’”
Mr. Bouton exposed other unsavory baseball secrets, writing that Yankee pitcher Whitey Ford routinely scuffed the baseball to make his pitches more deceptive. But at its heart, “Ball Four” is a comic view of the life of a lousy team.
The Seattle Pilots, a hapless expansion franchise that became the Milwaukee Brewers in 1970, were populated by interesting oddballs — some superstitious, some cerebral — and led by an affably profane manager, Joe Schultz, whose all- purpose prescription for any problem on or off the field was to “pound that Budweiser.”
As the season wore on, Mr. Bouton was sent to the minor leagues, then traded to another second- division team, the Houston Astros. “Ball Four” becomes, in these moments, a book of poignant self- reckoning and a love story about baseball itself. Like many of his teammates, Mr. Bouton was haunted by self- doubt, as he tried to hold on to his bigleague dreams.
“You live in terror that you’re going to wake up in the morning and not be able to pitch anymore. You wake up in the middle of the night and you make a throwing motion to see if it’s going to hurt,” he wrote.
Another observation he wrote in “Ball Four”: “You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”