He described bouts of trivia with questions like, “What was the name of Roy Rogers dog?” and “What was the name of the cat in the Buster Brown Show?” (Answers Bullet and Midnight.)īouton also told tales out of school about the heyday of the ‘60s Yankees - of which Bouton was a key part, as a fast-balling youngster. For him, it was about bored teammates passing the time by drafting what they considered the “all-ugly” team. Casey/AP)Īnd he wrote about the mundane, time-killing stuff that we all do.
Author Jim Bouton signs his book "Ball Four," at the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) annual convention in downtown Seattle on Friday, June 30, 2006. It chronicled his time with the ill-fated Seattle Pilots, the 1969 expansion team he played for (they quickly became the Milwaukee Brewers), and did something that had never been done before: he violated the "sanctity of the clubhouse," giving readers an inside peek at the big leagues.īouton kept a diary, revealing not just the greenies (speed) the players gobbled and the alcohol drunk, but how they reveled in the absolute joy of the game - the banter, the camaraderie, the glee that came with being allowed to play a boys' game well into adulthood, while often acting like adolescents.īouton turned baseball heroes into flawed and funny human beings, which made them all the more relatable in my world. He wrote about the kinds of things other people did to their betterment or detriment - drank too much, fretted over the longevity of their careers, tried to enhance performance via drugs, had affairs, fought amongst themselves, envied others accomplishments. “Ball Four” was published in 1970 when I was 13.
Jim Bouton, the author of the seminal baseball tell-all book "Ball Four," died this week, and a part of my childhood died with him.īouton, who was 80, wrote a book that was a life-changer for me and, I am certain, many other Baby Boomers. (AP) This article is more than 3 years old. Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton loses his cap pitching against the Cardinals in game 3 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium in New York on Oct.
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