Friday Pick of the Week
I stopped in to a Barnes & Noble last night and looked at a table full of baseball books. (It's spring training!) There are some really good ones out there—Jane Leavy's Koufax biography, David Maraniss' book on Roberto Clemente, Brad Snyder's
A Well-Paid Slave, the story of Curt Flood.
But I didn't see on the table perhaps the greatest baseball book of all time—Jim Bouton's
Ball Four.
The narrative of Ball Four is the story of Bouton, a pitcher, and his 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros. It's filled with great stories, self-deprecating humor, and savvy insights about the game of baseball as it's played both on and off the field. Bouton is a terrific storyteller, and the book is enormously fun to read.
But to really appreciate Ball Four, you have to put it in context. The book came out in 1970, a time when the sport was trying to navigate through the 1960s—and new competition from football for the hearts of America's sports fans—and was incredibly, anxiously image-conscious. Bouton's book made that job much tougher, simply because he told the truth about what the inner world of the game was really like.
In some ways, he was well-rewarded for it; the book has sold millions of copies. But in other ways, he's paid a price: He's still shunned by the baseball establishment and many of the players he wrote about. From today's perspective, it's hard to see why. But when you realize that no one wrote about this stuff before Bouton, how shocking this book must have been in its day, you can understand better the impact Ball Four had.
The funny thing about the book is, for all its associated scandal and notoriety, Ball Four is filled with a love of baseball. Bouton was essentially a whistleblower, and to my mind, that makes him more a hero than a cad. If there were more like him in baseball, would we ever have had the steroids scandal?
