Ball Four

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.

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 interested in his own job, not Bouton’s. He is angry that the team won’t pay him as much as he thinks he is worth. He is mad that middle management is incompetent and that they get their jobs because they don’t give the big boss a hard time. Well, that’s how it is and how it will be. The book’s success also owes something to the fact that it appeared around the time of the coming of free-agency in baseball - and serves as a reminder that the only power at the bottom is through organization.