Do You like book Ball Four (1990)?
This review thing asks: "What did you think?" My answer: "Jim Bouton is full of shit."I try to refrain from using profanity in things like book reviews, but in this case, it is the only way to categorize it.Apparently, when this book was first released, it cause a big stir in the baseball community and in the fandom of America. Mostly, I can see why: it is boring, and Bouton takes all 400+ pages to whine about money, coaches, his knuckleball, wanting to start/pitch, and he relishes every opportunity to dish on how depraved every single big league ball player is.He also, with delight, flouted the stated motto that "what happens in the clubhouse, stays in the clubhouse" that governs baseball.And he continually acts surprised that fellow baseball players hated the book.Did I mention that this book is boring? The sections were divided up into days, all during the 1969 baseball season, and as each section was lifted from a diary, they were repetitive, and mostly filled with mind-numbing minutiae or strange anecdotes.On this site, and on the book itself, I've seen this "memoir" praised as "An American Classic" and "a book deep in the American vein" and "the funniest book". Uh huh. Perhaps in 1969 when the book had some shock value, maybe. Now? The book is as washed up as Jim Bouton has been his entire career.This book does nothing to advance the magic of baseball, or really tell about the ins and outs of baseball unless you want to believe that every player is a peeping tom that whines about money and when he gets to play next. Maybe that was baseball in 1969, but this is 2011 and this book should be forgotten.Save yourself the pain, read something else.
—Phil
Ball Four might be the greatest baseball book ever written! Correction, Ball Four might be the greatest sports book ever written. What Bouton accomplished with Ball Four was to tear the cover off of professional sports by exposing the tangled core underneath the canned responses to interviews, the hagiography of sports heroes, and the mundane existence of living out of a suitcase for six months. The haloed Yankees hated this book as it painted their hero Mickey Mantle as less than a shining light, the fans didn't care for that either. Players thought it broke the sacred bonds of The Team. But Bouton was always an iconoclast; he cared and fought for what he thought was fair pay long before the free agent era, he talked to reporters in thoughtful conversations, and he took notes. After Bouton blew out his arm for the Yankees he reinvents himself as a knuckleball pitcher and gets called up to a new franchise, the Seattle Pilots. Filled with castoffs and fringe players the Pilots are the perfect team for Bouton to chronologically capture daily life in major league baseball. Funny, wry, and reflective daily recordings from a man with one last gasp of glory left in his arm, and it's not by throwing the baseball. What Bouton deftly does is invite you in on the difficulties and the absurdity, the grind and the goofy, the stoic and the bored. This is best read as following a baseball season, one day at a time. You can relive a team's infamous one year season daily as told by a true voice from the inside.
—John
My mom recently tried to read Bouton's baseball diary, but couldn't get past March 7. I picked it up and am rereading it yet again, enjoying it as much as ever. I've read it more than 20 times and it still means so much to me. If any book could be said to have changed my life, it would be this one.Bouton was an iconoclast, a breed apart from most other ballplayers, and not just because he read books that didn't have pictures. He spoke up for himself, he stuck to his guns (even as he knew it was costing him professionally), and he did it with a sense of humor. And even in a working world that held different values that his and often kept him at arm's length, he still found like-minded people and made friends.Ball Four is funny, raunchy, aggravating, heartening, and above all *real*. Full disclosure: I once wrote Bouton a letter telling him what the book had meant to me growing up. At the end of the week he called me up and told me how much my letter had meant to him. Now how could you not appreciate a writer who takes the time to do that?
—Patrick
