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.