Jim Bouton

James Alan Bouton (born March 8, 1939 in Newark, New Jersey) was a Major League Baseball player and author of the controversial baseball book Ball Four, which was a combination diary of his 1969 season and memoir of his years with the New York Yankees.

While attending high school, Bouton was nicknamed "Warm-Up Bouton" because he never got to play in a school game, serving much of his time as a benchwarmer.

Bouton started his major league career in 1962 with the Yankees, and in the subsequent two seasons the hard-throwing right-hander won 21 and 18 games and appeared in the 1963 All Star Game. He was known for his cap flying off at the completion of his delivery to the plate. However, in 1965, an arm injury slowed his fastball and ended his status as a pitching phenomenon. Relegated mostly to bullpen duty, Bouton began experimenting with the knuckleball in an effort to lengthen his career. In 1969, after 2 years as a relief pitcher, Bouton was sold to an expansion team, the Seattle Pilots.

Ball Four broke numerous taboos because of its explicit depiction of life in baseball. While it contained numerous amusing and unflattering stories, it also revealed for the first time the drinking habits of Mickey Mantle and his Yankee teammates, which had been kept out of the press. Bouton also described the drug use and womanizing rampant among major-league baseball players. Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn called the book "detrimental to baseball." The book made him unpopular with many other baseball players and coaches, who felt he had betrayed their trust and breached the long-standing rule that what happens in the clubhouse stays in the clubhouse. He described the fallout from Ball Four and his ensuing battles with Kuhn and other the following year in another diary, entitled I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally.

Bouton retired in 1970. He was a local sports anchor for New York stations WABC-TV and WCBS-TV. He appeared as an actor in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973) and had the lead role in the 1976 CBS television series Ball Four, which was loosely adapted from the book and was cancelled after only a few episodes. By this time the book had a cult audience of fans who saw it as an honest and comic portrayal of the ups and downs of baseball life. Bouton went on the college lecture circuit, delivering humorous talks revolving around baseball, broadcasting, and his experiences with the book.

The urge to play baseball would not leave him. His comeback bid in 1975 failed, but in 1978, the anti-establishment Ted Turner signed him to a contract with the Atlanta Braves, where he compiled a 1-3 record in five starts. Bouton detailed his comeback in a third book, titled Ball Five as well as adding a Ball Six, updating the stories of the players in Ball Four, for the 20th anniversary edition. These were collected (in 2000) with the original as Ball Four: The Final Pitch, along with a new coda that detailed his reconciliation with the Yankees following the death of his daughter in a road traffic accident.

After his baseball career ended a second time, Bouton was one of the inventors of "Big League Chew," a bubblegum product shredded to resemble chewing tobacco and sold in a tobacco-like pouch. He has also written Strike Zone (a baseball novel) and edited an anthology about managers, entitled I Managed Good, But Boy Did They Play Bad. He has also written Foul Ball (published 2003) a non-fiction account of his (ultimately unsuccesful) attempt to save Wahconah Park, a historic minor league baseball stadium in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Writings

• Ball Four has been through numerous significantly revised editions, the most recent being Ball Four: The Final Pitch, Bulldog Publishing. (April 2001), ISBN 097091170X.
• Foul Ball, Bulldog Publishing. (June 2003), ISBN 0970911718.
• Strike Zone, Signet Books. (March 1995), ISBN 0451183347.

Quotes

"You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time."

"This winter [1977] I'm working out every day, throwing against a wall. I'm 11-0 against the wall."

External links

• Template:Baseball-reference
• Jim Bouton's official homepage (http://www.jimbouton.com)