Thursday Wildcard: Ball Four

Kind of hard to "smoke 'em inside" with a knuckleball.

I'm a huge Flyers fan, and last night they lost the Stanley Cup Finals. Boo. So now for me baseball season has begun. Baseball comes well after Flyers hockey and Eagles football for me. I'm a baseball fan first and a fan of a team second. One of the things I like to do each summer, usually late spring, is read one of my favorite books of all time, Jim Bouton's Ball Four. It's Bouton's diary of his 1969 season, as he struggles to adapt to being a mediocre knuckleball pitcher on the expansion Seattle Pilots, and interspersed through out are great stories from his time with the Yankees (he was an All Star in '63) in the mid 1960s, when he was a very good and promising fireballer, only to get hurt and flame out. Bouton's jerked around by the piss-poor organized Pilots (after one terrible year they would move and be the Milwaukee Brewers and continue to be terrible for a decade), battles with his inept coaching staff, struggles to gain any kind of consistency in his pitching for most of the season and tries to shed his image inside the locker room as an outsider. Late in the season he's dealt to the contending Houston Astros and we see what it's like for a hanger on trying to provide a little patchwork to a team clawing for survival. It's an interesting character study.

Oh, and it's absolutely hilarious. One of the reasons it's maybe my favorite book is the writing style, it's like Bouton is right next to you, telling you these stories, or like you're actually there. For an unprofessional writer, it's quite remarkable. At the time it was published, 1970, it was seen as highly controversial because it talked about things like Mickey Mantle drinking and ball players "shooting beaver." It only scratched the surface of events on the field, most of the book is sharing dirty little secrets that occurred off the field. Then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who called the book "detrimental to baseball" asked him to sign a statement saying it was all fake and written by Bouton's co-author Leonard Schecter. Bouton refused.

So now it's time to dust it off and dig in. If you're a baseball fan, I can't recommend it enough.