Ball Four

472 pages

English language

Published Nov. 16, 1990 by Collier Books.

ISBN:
978-0-02-513980-0
Copied ISBN!

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (4 reviews)

Twentieth-anniversary edition of a baseball classic, with a new epilogue by Jim Bouton. When first published in 1970, Ball Four stunned the sports world. The commissioner, executives, and players were shocked. Sportswriters called author Jim Bouton a traitor and "social leper." Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force him to declare the book untrue. Fans, however, loved the book. And serious critics called it an important social document. Today, Jim Bouton is still not invited to Oldtimer's Days at Yankee Stadium. But his landmark book is still being read by people who don't ordinarily follow baseball.

5 editions

Review of 'Ball Four' on 'Storygraph'

3 stars

Jim Bouten isn’t nearly as clever or funny as he thinks. Maybe he read that way in 1969 when BALL FOUR came out but here in the present it’s 500 pages of chit chat with a conversation partner way too pleased with his own half of the occasion. As he grew though, so did his writing. Read the epilogues and you get a great sense of baseball, the book and it’s history and the man who wrote it. That’s really all you need.

Review of 'Ball Four' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Jim Bouton’s classic and entertaining tell-all book made from his diary written during his 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots (now the Milwaukee Brewers) and the Houston Astros. There was a huge uproar when it was published - how dare he mention Mickey Mantle’s drinking!? - and Bouton was persona non grata especially with his old team the Yankees for many years, and for some he still is - just read the other reviews here. The book is, of course, about baseball, but it is also about Bouton’s coming to grips with his own inadequacies and, maybe, learning about the nature of workplace sociology. Because, to me, this book only happens to be set on a baseball team; the facts are familiar to anyone who works anywhere, and that is why it remains popular. In a sense Bouton plays an innocent who is shocked to discover that his boss is …

avatar for mpmurawski

rated it

4 stars
avatar for slowline

rated it

3 stars

Subjects

  • Bouton, Jim
  • Baseball players -- United States -- Biography
  • Baseball -- United States