BALL FOUR: Perfect, Even 50 Years Later
For as long as I can remember, a large, hardcover, anniversary edition of Jim Bouton‘s BALL FOUR sat on the the bookshelf in my childhood bedroom. I’m not sure how it got there, but I bet it was a gift from someone along the way, either to myself or to my dad. Either way, I never so much as picked it up.
For some reason, it just never appealed to me- it was too daunting as a young child, I guess I never got to it in high school or college, and with Twitter essentially serving as an up-to-the-second tell-all book that couldn’t be more relevant, the idea of sitting down and reading about players I’d never heard of in an era I couldn’t relate to just didn’t seem all that appealing.
Then Jim Bouton died, just a few months ago. I found myself devouring every single obituary I could get my hands on. There were many. Every major publication took time to reflect on the life of the man who wrote the only sports book to make the Top 100 Books of the 20th Century List, put the literary world on its head, and forever altered the course of baseball history.
But the one that really spoke to me was by Jay Jaffe. I think I read it six times. Intellectually, I knew Bouton was important, though I never spent that much time thinking about him. I guess I just assumed the book must be good, but dated. I read in all these obits, especially Jaffe’s, how much Bouton and BALL FOUR meant to people whom I follow and respect, whom I relate to readily.
I decided I need to finally see what the talk was about, so I went home to New York and I got the book.
I loved it. I honestly loved it. It had me cackling to myself in an empty room and, no joke, sobbing uncontrollably, letting large tear drops fall on the never before read pages.
Now, in 2019, there are so many levels BALL FOUR can be interpreted on.
Most superficially, the book, which takes place during the 1969 season, is a window into the real lives of now-mythical figures such as Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford.
I was 4 years old when Mantle died. I have no memories or first hand experiences with him. To me, Mantle is as distant a historical figure as Sandy Koufax, Babe Ruth, Thomas Jefferson, or Marcus Aurelius. Bouton humanizes him, turns him into a real person with real stories and anecdotes told not about the revered Mick, but about some guy in the locker room or in the bar or busting his ass in Spring Training like everyone else. Same goes for Ford, Willie Mays, Johnny Sain, and even Joe Morgan. The book is a window into the young lives of people that I only think of as statues.
A little deeper, it’s not too hard to see how jaw dropping this book must have been when it first came out. Looking back, the revelation that ballplayers used amphetamines and committed adultery, and went ‘beaver-shooting’ (which is not what you think it is, unless its exactly what you think it is) must have been just as jarring as learning about the deceit, mistrust, underhanded tactics, and outright lies told during salary negotiations. It’s upsetting even in hindsight to hear the stories of ballplayers living in the time of the Reserve Clause, fighting tooth and nail for an extra thousand dollars in salary or $50 in moving expenses after they got called up or sent down.
With few exceptions, the summer ‘baseball habit’ of these men exacted a great toll on their families and their financial futures, and they passed up much more lucrative ‘normal’ jobs just to try and hang on one more year. All the while, the owners and the league grew ever richer.
This is not a new story now that we are multiple work stoppages and a generation or two later. But at the time, this was revelatory.
I’ll admit, one of the reasons I stayed away from BALL FOUR for so long was that I didn’t want to ‘put myself in the shoes of a fan in 1972.’ I didn’t want to have to imagine what it was like to first learn about greenies and cheap GMs. It all seemed a little quaint and a lot exhausting, but the book didn’t let it be. There are no long ruminations on the drugs in a major league clubhouse, just asides and quick stories. The book is so good because Bouton is so good at writing it.
This book is the story of a team and a summer and a group of good acquaintances told by ‘one of the guys’ who isn’t really one of the guys, and everyone knows it. It’s the most relatable story in the world. I never met Roy Oyler or had even heard of Gene Brabender, but I know them. I know them because Bouton captures them so well and I know them because I played with them in summer ball, in high school, and in college.
Part of the magic of this book, I think, is the time it took place. 1969 was the very, very end of the preceding era. Starting in the early ’70’s, with the start of free agency, salaries started to rise, player movement changed (though Bouton would argue not become more common) and, perhaps most importantly, TV became increasingly ubiquitous. The relationship between fans and players changed and as a result, there were no more stars like Mantle and Mays and Ford and Rod Carew who lived in the pages of newspapers, on radios, and in imaginations. BALL FOUR stands at the threshold of the next era, gazing backwards from in front of a closing door.
As a result, the Major League Baseball of BALL FOUR is much more like the high schools and colleges that most of played in at than the clubhouses of Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, and Mark McGwire. At the same time, it makes a persuasive case that a locker room is a locker room, that it’s always funny when someone nails a pair of shoes to the floor.
The book is just so damn relatable. Bouton, despite all the time he spends decrying the seedy business of baseball makes sure it’s clear how much fun he’s having. That he’s hanging on as a knuckleballer on an expansion team nearly 7 years after his last truly effective season because why would you ever leave a clubhouse and team and baseball if you could avoid it? It’s the best thing in the world.
At the same time, Bouton is upfront about his incredible frustration, also all too relatable, with having his personal and professional future, not to mention his mood at any given moment, in the hands and Kafka-esque logic of coaches. Coaches who don’t have all the information they need to make the right decision but who clearly don’t even want it. The coaching decision making he describes, and just about any ballplayer can instantly relate to, is so indecipherable and so based on whims that you constantly live your life on eggshells, trying to exude just the right aura to affect a process you know in the back of your head is completely nonsensical, yet so important.
The copy I have, the anniversary edition, features BALL FIVE, BALL SIX, and BALL SEVEN, three essays Bouton wrote 10, 20, and 30 years after the publication of the original book. Needless to say, they’re fantastic. They’re also utterly heartbreaking.
Through the book and the first two epilogues, you move with Bouton in the past, headed towards the future but armed only with the knowledge you have in that moment and with no inkling of what’s to come. Everything is in the present tense and optimistic, there’s no reason to fear what you can’t possibly know is coming.
It’s what makes the tragic death of Bouton’s daughter at age 31 absolutely gutting. We, the reader, have known her since she was less than 5. We’d checked in with her when she was in her teens and twenties. We’d seen all the ups and downs and changes in her life and that of her family. And then we stand with her father as he learns of her death in the worst possible way.
Unlike fiction, there is no sense of a journey towards a destination, no vague idea that the beginning of the book is a set up for the middle and the end. It just is. It just happened. It’s a hell of a way to wrap up a hilarious, light hearted, entertaining, spectacular book.
BALL FOUR is a tell all book, a day-in-the-life chronicle of the 1969 Seattle Pilots season as told by a quirky middle reliever. It was written for me and I never knew it.
What I really didn’t understand was that it isn’t hailed and lauded because it was first and broke so much new ground. No, it’s hailed and lauded because it was the best.
-Max Frankel
