When Jim Bouton passed away at age 80 from a brain disease linked to dementia, I was prompted to reread Ball Four, the iconic diary of the pitcher’s 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and the Houston Astros.
If you are of the same generation as modern-day major leaguers, you may have never heard of Bouton or“Ball Four. That’s what sportswriter Thom Loverro of the Washington Times discovered last year when he queried some of the Washington Nationals.
The book was first published in 1970 and has sold five million-plus copies. In 1995, the New York Public Library selected Ball Four as one of about 150 Books of the Century, alongside such works as Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It is the only sports book on the list.
Is it a great book? In terms of impact, yes. As John Feinstein, author of A Season on the Brink, his journal of the 1987 season he spent with Bobby Knight and the Indiana University basketball team, said in a tribute to Bouton in The Washington Post, “Bouton proved the importance of firsthand reporting, of truly getting inside a subject. Besides All The President’s Men, no book influenced me more as a reporter.”
The library editors noted that Bouton’s book “was the first ripple of a tidal wave of ‘tell-all’ books that have become commonplace not only in sports, but also in politics, entertainment, and other realms of contemporary life.”
Is it excellent writing? Bouton was no Steinbeck or Kafka, but he wrote well, and many of his stories are hilarious. Sportswriter Leonard Shecter edited the original version, and Bouton added “Ball Five,” “Ball Six,” and “Ball Seven” — later.
But there is one way in which the book is not so great — virtually nobody on the team knew that Bouton was writing it.
As Joe Morgan, Bouton’s teammate on the Astros, told Mark Armour of the Society for American Baseball Research, “I always thought he was a teammate, not an author. I told him some things I would never tell a sportswriter.” Similarly, according to Bouton’s “Ball Six,” Rich Rollins, who was Bouton’s teammate on the 1969 Pilots, told a Seattle newspaper, “What offended me more than anything was that no one was aware what he was writing.”
When Feinstein wrote his book about Knight, the coach had given him unprecedented access to the locker room and team for that season. Nothing Feinstein wrote should have surprised Knight, although, characteristically, Knight still found things to be upset about when the book was published.
Bouton revealed many salacious and personal details. For example, he wrote about his teammates’ “beaver-shooting,” that is, trying to look up the skirts or into the hotel windows of attractive women) and popping greenies (amphetamines). And he didn’t stick to that 1969 season. He went back to his years with the New York Yankees and revealed that Mickey Mantle was the ringleader of the Peeping Tom unit and had a significant problem with alcohol.
Of course, Bouton’s book was neither the first nor the last presumably tell-all book. Years before Bouton, Cincinnati Reds pitcher Jim Brosnan chronicled two seasons, 1959 and 1961, in his books The Long Season and Pennant Race. As Mike Durell wrote in his review of those books, “There are still numerous moments of candor regarding drinking and, somewhat more discreetly, skirt-chasing. For readers accustomed to every sordid detail of an athlete’s sordid acts being disseminated worldwide seconds after they occur, The Long Season and Pennant Race may seem somewhat tame. Still, to older readers they will seem refreshingly discreet. There is something to be said for discretion and implication. More is not always better.”
Bouton read The Long Season as a 21-year-old pitcher for the Yankees’ Greensboro, N.C., farm club. He loved the book, which inspired his writing Ball Four. In my opinion, he went too far.
As Connie Ray Godwin wrote in his review for Sports Rapport of Instant Replay, the diary of the 1967 Green Bay Packers season by Jerry Kramer, “Kramer violates the ‘what happens in the locker room stays in the locker room’ ethos, but not to a flagrant or irresponsible degree…. Kramer exercises discretion and deftly straddles the boundary between being candid and destroying the reputations of his teammates, coaches, and opponents.”
In Ball Six, Bouton wrote: “I must admit that it pains me to hear that some former teammates are still angry about Ball Four. But I’m not surprised. They see the book as an invasion of their privacy. And maybe they’re embarrassed by something they said or did. Those players don’t realize that nobody thinks badly of them, no matter what they say or do, especially after twenty years. But they don’t have that perspective.”
I think the person who needed perspective was Bouton. The players saw it as an invasion of privacy because it was one. And how could Bouton know what other people thought of the players? His revelations did lower my opinion of Mantle, my first childhood baseball hero.
Bouton did regret that his book spawned a host of sports tell-all books, each vying to be more revealing than the last. For example, Jose Canseco became baseball’s public enemy number one after he wrote Juiced” and named ballplayers using steroids.
As Paul Sullivan of The Chicago Tribune wrote of Canseco’s book and others like it, “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.”
And that’s a shame.
Matt Sieger, now retired sports reporter/columnist who worked for New York State and California newspapers, did his undergraduate work at Cornell University and received a master’s in journalism from Syracuse University. He is the author of The God Squad: The Born-Again San Francisco Giants of 1978. This article first appeared in The Vacaville (California) Reporter on July 22, 2019.