“A book so deep in the American vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book.” – David Halberstam, on Ball Four
As the 2012 baseball season opens, the time seems right to revisit Ball Four, a chronicle of a season that, for its author, was a time of reflection and hoped-for rebirth—as is the start of any season for athletes and fans. Back in 1969, Jim Bouton wasn’t trying to change the world; he was simply trying to keep a diary of his season.
Once a promising right-hander for the Mantle-era Yankees, Bouton injured his arm during the ’65 season and struggled to regain his status as a starting pitcher. Smart and opinionated (never a combination that many jocks could claim, much to the delight of parsimonious owners), Bouton delivered a book that lifted the lid off the official mythology of athletic glory … and in the process he became much more than a pretty good knuckleballer.
Ball Four hit with the impact of Citizen Kane in cinema and Sgt. Pepper’s in rock music. Sports books existed before Ball Four, and sports books came after. Never, however, has there been anything quite like Bouton’s book.
Praise, of course, comes with a caveat. As Bouton opened the door to the secret world of the boys’ clubhouse, other athletes felt compelled to take the door off its hinges and let all the smoke clear. Bouton acknowledges in the introduction to the edition of the book I have (the 1990 edition, pre-steroid era), that Ball Four unknowingly changed the way that athletes and former athletes themselves wrote sports books. Gone went the days of live right, practice hard, and you can make it. Athletes suddenly felt compelled to top the “revelations” of Bouton’s book simply to sell more copies.
Read today, Ball Four doesn’t seem all that inflammatory. (We now know, thanks to Bouton, that Mickey Mantle chased women and hobbled his career with alcoholism and poor physical conditioning). At the time, however, Ball Four got Bouton hauled in to the commissioner’s office. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn wanted Bouton to retract all that he’d written because it went further than sports books or journalism of the day had ever gone. Reporters of the time generally passed themselves off as pals with sports icons. Kuhn felt it bad business to piss off your sources by revealing their peccadilloes—how many drinks and how many dames they had on the road, for instance.
Bouton became baseball’s Public Enemy No. 1. The Yankees refused to invite him to their annual Old-Timer’s Day for decades. Today? When a player or former player airs material far more salacious than baseball players looking up the skirts of unassuming females, the rewards include round-the-clock interviews on ESPN and maybe a slap on the wrist from a commissioner.
The figure most comparable to Jim Bouton may be Jose Canseco, the former “Bash Brother” to Mark McGwire in Oakland. Canseco today seems most notable for dating Madonna (at least he claims this in his own tell-all book, Juiced) and having a ball bounce off his head in a moment immortalized in countless sports blooper airings on TV. Oh, and he hit 462 career home runs, putting him at number 32 all-time.
All those home runs turn out to be part of Canseco’s problem. Not since Bouton has there been a social pariah quite like Jose Canseco. Juiced broke the code of silence between baseball players and managers regarding the use of anabolic steroids. Though Congress later uncovered evidence that backed his allegations, Canseco became the Benedict Arnold (or the new Jim Bouton) of baseball, a rogue who dared to speak of things not spoken.
I’ve never actually sat down and read Canseco’s book, but I do remember the way sports journalists had to balance their outrage at Jose for openly writing about steroid use against the outrage they then personally had to express when it turned out McGwire and Sammy Sosa (the heroes who saved baseball in the summer of 1998 with their home-run chase of Roger Maris’ single-season record) were ‘roid cheats. McGwire and Sosa both appeared before Congress with Canseco; McGwire suffered apparent memory loss and Sosa forgot how to speak English. In time, Barry Bonds, the man who broke both McGwire and Sosa’s tainted records (and eventually Henry Aaron’s lifetime mark), would also be accused of using human-growth hormones, further casting suspicion on the entire game of baseball after 1989.
Bouton, by contrast, wasn’t really in it for the notoriety. He had a family to feed, and salary issues dominate his book. In the era before free agency, a ballplayer found himself at the mercy of his club’s owner, and that mercy often proved terribly lacking. Fifty years removed from the Black Sox scandal (when eight players from the White Sox threw the World Series just to pocket a little more pay than the peanuts paid by the team owner), salaries still weren’t much better. Even the Yankees, dominant since the age of Babe Ruth when it came to the post-season sweepstakes, turned stingy when it came to paying talent. Owners easily pushed most players around and forced them into less-than-favorable signings. Bouton, on the other hand, stood up for himself. His querulous dealings with management, along with his injury, gave New York an excuse to trade him, but the haggling over money that began with his rookie contract put him on management’s bad side wherever he went.