More about the late Jim Bouton: "Hey, it’s O.K. to be on the outside."

The striking part about Ball Four's appeal that Jim Bouton's critics routinely missed is perfectly stated by Charles P. Pierce in one succinct sentence at Deadspin.

Jim Bouton made it acceptable -- even, maybe, cool -- to love baseball again.

As usual, baseball's current ownership cadre is working overtime to miss this lesson. Meanwhile Pierce's tribute to Bouton is spot on, as usual, though not to ignore Tyler Kepner's fine thoughts in the New York Times.

In particular this passage from Kepner turned my head. As always when it comes to writing, if you can find the words that hit your reader in the gut, you've won the game -- then you start all over again, next time.

I had first talked to Bouton 25 years earlier, in 1992, when I was a teenager and had just read “Ball Four” for the first time. I was an aspiring sportswriter but also a frustrated high school pitcher — a warm-up guy. When I read his book, Bouton seemed like a friend. It was good to know there was someone like him out there.

“I don’t think any teenager feels comfortable in his group,” he told me then, when I mentioned how deeply I connected with the book. “You’re trying to figure out how the world works: ‘How do you get from here to there, who am I and how do I fit into things and what the hell am I going to do with my life? I don’t have any answers.’ And so to read a book by a guy who’s in the same situation, who’s 30 years old, they have to say to themselves, ‘Hey, it’s O.K. to be on the outside.’”

On the outside, forever and always; I'll be 59 in August, and yep, that's me.

I'm still unsure about who I am, still trying to figure out the world and determine how I might fit into it, still completely baffled as to what I might do with my life, and still reacting viscerally to Quadrophenia by The Who because after all, I've no more clue than the protagonist Jimmy as to why this uncertain feeling is still here in my brain.

Pierce again, grasping fundamental points.

Ever since Bouton passed on Wednesday at the age of 80, of a particularly vicious form of amyloid dementia—Americans of a certain age have been dropping lines from Ball Four as though it had been published last week, instead of nearly 50 years ago. Many of the primary reactions on the electric Twitter machine to Bouton’s death was some variation of Seattle Pilots manager Joe Schultz’s philosophical pondering—“shitfuck” or, alternatively, “fuckshit.” Friends consoled friends, advising each other to smoke ‘em inside and then go pound some Budweiser. There were some mournful renditions of “It Makes a Fella Proud To Be An Astro.” Ball Four did more than sell a lot of books and corrupt a million young American baseball fans. It implanted a conception of being a fan that was totally different from anything that had come before it, a strange but hilarious commingling of unbridled affection and informed cynicism that mirrored Bouton’s own, a love for the game energized by an enthusiastic disrespect for the people who run it, and for some of the “unwritten rules” that had deserved to be mocked for decades.

Perhaps I've never realized the extent to which Bouton was a role model for me. Lest we forget, in Ball Four writer Bouton reminds us that a college term paper written by fellow pitcher Mike Marshall was called "Baseball Is an Ass" -- not the game itself, but the authority figures attached to it. 

“With (Steve) Hovley gone, Mike Marshall is probably the most articulate guy on the club, so I asked him if he had as much trouble communicating as I’ve had and he said, ‘Of course. The minute I approach a coach or a manager, I can see the terror in his eyes.’ ”

Just like in Nawbany when they see you coming and cross the street to walk on the other side.

Let's conclude with these words by Bruce Markusen in 2015, and the two retrospectives he composed.

"All these years later, many of us still care about the characters of Ball Four. And I suspect we always will."

“Ball Four’s” Characters Revisted: The Seattle Days

“Ball Four’s” Characters Revisited: On to Houston

R.I.P. Jim Bouton: "After Ball Four, sports hagiography was never the same."

Jim Bouton has died at 80.

Long live the memory of Ball Four's author. On Twitter and later at The Nation, sportswriter Dave Zirin recalled an epic meeting of the minds.

After Ball Four, sports hagiography was never the same. I was fortunate enough to speak on several panels with Bouton — including one in Boston with historian Howard Zinn, where Bouton and Zinn, longtime admirers of each other, met for the first time.

Bouton with Zinn?

How could I avoid being a Jim Bouton fan?

In my experience, Jim Bouton wasn't just the quirky character who wrote "Ball Four," the book that opened the door on what really goes on behind the curtain in Major League Baseball. To me, he was more of an anarchist. (The Village Voice even referred to him once as "Baseball's Bolshevik.") He didn't just like to challenge authority, he reveled in it. He loved throwing grenades into foxholes to see what would happen and where the debris landed.

The preceding excerpt is from a column by Tony Dobrowolski in the Berkshire Eagle from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a city that figured prominently in what I believe was Bouton's final book, FOUL BALL: My Life and Hard Times Trying to Save an Old Ballpark."

In his first diary since Ball Four, Jim Bouton recounts his amazing adventure trying to save Wahconah Park, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Host to organized baseball since 1892, Wahconah Park was soon to be abandoned by the owner of the Pittsfield Mets who would move his team to a new stadium in another town---an all too familiar story.

Coincidentally, we drove through Pittsfield in route to Northampton MA on June 29, at which point we were only twenty miles away from Bouton's home in Great Barrington.

How influential has Bouton's Ball Four been in my life? Well, it's been 45 years since the first time I read it, and numerous anecdotes not only are fresh in my mind, but remain part of my daily repartee.

One of them is about a Seattle Pilots teammate who had a particularly vehement spat with the umpire behind home plate. Weeks passed, stars aligned, and this hitter again came to bat, with the same umpire calling balls and strikes.

The first pitch was ridiculously far outside, and the umpire decisively called it a strike. Bouton's teammate stepped out of the box, but said nothing. The next pitch was two feet high, and the batter somehow tommy-hawked it off the outfield wall for a double.

The umpire turned to the Pilots bench and said, "See? It makes him a better hitter."

Then there's the one about Bouton's former teammate, the legendary superstar Mickey Mantle.

It was the mid-1960s, and the Yankee dynasty was beginning to fade. The aging slugger Mantle arrived at the ballpark massively hungover and was given the day off by the team's sympathetic manager, but late in the game, with the Yanks behind, Mantle was needed to pinch-hit.

Half-blind with pain and the effects of the previous evening's dissipation, "The Mick" lofted a majestic game-winning home run.

He slowly circled the bases and returned to the dugout to greet his cheering teammates, saying to no one in particular: "You have no idea how hard that really was."

The following dates to 2016.

---

Cultural education: Jim Bouton's landmark book, Ball Four.

John Thorn is the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball, and as Thorn rightfully gushes, Jim Bouton is the author of Ball Four, one of the most influential books of my reading life. In the early 1970s, my copy looked just like the one pictured here.

Not unexpectedly, an overview of Ball Four by Mark Armour at the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) website is among the most complete that I've seen.

Today’s fans and writers, children or young adults when they first devoured the book, re-read it every two or three years. The book is universally viewed as well-written, provocative, thought-provoking, and funny. It is difficult to imagine that such a book could be controversial, that its author would be shunned by people within the game for many years, and in fact is still shunned. It is so.

Thorn takes the story from here.

Jim Bouton: An Improvisational Life, by John Thorn (Our Game)

... What emboldened me to approach (Jim Bouton) was my knowledge of his ongoing efforts to bring baseball back to Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which had hosted baseball on this same spot since 1892.

“It might interest you, Jim,” I offered, “that baseball was played in Pittsfield a full century earlier, and I have evidence of a prohibition against its play anywhere near a newly erected church. The actual document, I was told by the town clerk, survives.”

This stunned him. It was a great way to promote Pittsfield and his campaign. We became fast friends. He and his colleagues went on to scour the town’s archives and unearthed two manuscript copies of the “Pittsfield Prohibition” of 1791 and, barely a month after our conversation in Hackensack, we held a press conference. Because the ban placed baseball — as played by that name — in 18th-century America, the discovery turned out to be an international event. (For more about the Pittsfield story and what it means, see: https://goo.gl/BH9nOc) ...

There have been a couple "vintage" baseball games played in metro Louisville during recent years, and I've always been out of town, which is frustrating.

... A Vintage Base Ball Federation followed, with games in a number of locations for several years. I was involved in all of it, but for me the principal benefit of reviving the old ball game was the friendship with Jim that continues to this day. Though we get together with our wives regularly for dinner at a favorite neighborhood restaurant, I confess to being star-struck still — and not because Jim won twenty games for the Yankees a couple of times before I went off to college.

He is the man who wrote Ball Four.

I will not detail Jim’s life here. His biography is wonderfully sketched by Mark Armour in an entry for SABR’s Baseball Biography Project (https://goo.gl/Xre4Gs). Permit me to focus now on Ball Four: its landmark place in history; the revolution it inspired; and the importance of the impending sale at auction of its underlying notes, drafts, audiotapes, and related materials, whose very survival was largely unknown.

---

There's also this:

On the Seattle Pilots, George Brunet and the lives of journeymen.

Cultural education: Jim Bouton's landmark book, Ball Four.

John Thorn is the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball, and as Thorn rightfully gushes, Jim Bouton is the author of Ball Four, one of the most influential books of my reading life. In the early 1970s, my copy looked just like the one pictured here.

Not unexpectedly, an overview of Ball Four by Mark Armour at the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) website is among the most complete that I've seen.

Today’s fans and writers, children or young adults when they first devoured the book, re-read it every two or three years. The book is universally viewed as well-written, provocative, thought-provoking, and funny. It is difficult to imagine that such a book could be controversial, that its author would be shunned by people within the game for many years, and in fact is still shunned. It is so.

Thorn takes the story from here.

Jim Bouton: An Improvisational Life, by John Thorn (Our Game)

... What emboldened me to approach (Jim Bouton) was my knowledge of his ongoing efforts to bring baseball back to Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which had hosted baseball on this same spot since 1892.

“It might interest you, Jim,” I offered, “that baseball was played in Pittsfield a full century earlier, and I have evidence of a prohibition against its play anywhere near a newly erected church. The actual document, I was told by the town clerk, survives.”

This stunned him. It was a great way to promote Pittsfield and his campaign. We became fast friends. He and his colleagues went on to scour the town’s archives and unearthed two manuscript copies of the “Pittsfield Prohibition” of 1791 and, barely a month after our conversation in Hackensack, we held a press conference. Because the ban placed baseball — as played by that name — in 18th-century America, the discovery turned out to be an international event. (For more about the Pittsfield story and what it means, see: https://goo.gl/BH9nOc) ...

There have been a couple "vintage" baseball games played in metro Louisville during recent years, and I've always been out of town, which is frustrating.

... A Vintage Base Ball Federation followed, with games in a number of locations for several years. I was involved in all of it, but for me the principal benefit of reviving the old ball game was the friendship with Jim that continues to this day. Though we get together with our wives regularly for dinner at a favorite neighborhood restaurant, I confess to being star-struck still — and not because Jim won twenty games for the Yankees a couple of times before I went off to college.

He is the man who wrote Ball Four.

I will not detail Jim’s life here. His biography is wonderfully sketched by Mark Armour in an entry for SABR’s Baseball Biography Project (https://goo.gl/Xre4Gs). Permit me to focus now on Ball Four: its landmark place in history; the revolution it inspired; and the importance of the impending sale at auction of its underlying notes, drafts, audiotapes, and related materials, whose very survival was largely unknown.

On the Seattle Pilots, George Brunet and the lives of journeymen.

It all started when I stumbled upon a documentary about the 1969 Seattle Pilots (released circa 2010). You can skip Part One (it's only a snippet) and begin here: The Seattle Pilots: Short Flight into History.

The Seattle Pilots were an American professional baseball team based in Seattle, Washington for one season, 1969. The Pilots played home games at Sick's Stadium and were a member of the West Division of Major League Baseball's American League. On April 1, 1970, they moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and changed their name to the Brewers.

Jim Bouton played for the 1969 Seattle Pilots, and wrote a book about it. It is no exaggeration to state the Ball Four is one of the seminal texts in American sporting history, and I fairly devoured it at the age of 12, with repeat readings for years to follow.

Save for Ball Four, the Pilots would remain little more than an archaic footnote in major league history. It explains why 40-plus years after reading it for the first time, this documentary brings the ill-fated Pilots vibrantly back to life through both archival footage and filmed appearances by surviving players -- and their ranks have thinned considerably, before and since filming.

Most of those still here to tell the tale are in their mid- to late-70s. Sicks Stadium is long demolished. Seattle was awarded a second expansion franchise in 1977, and the Mariners have succeeded where their predecessors failed.

Internet + baseball fan = Memorial Day weekend rabbit hole doubleheader, and so it is that I began researching the life of pitcher George Brunet, who features prominently in Bouton's book, most famously during a digression about the usefulness of underwear. Brunet also is the topic of a fine anecdote in the film, as related by Greg Goosen (repeated here).

The Brunet narrative trail has been blazed, starting here.

Cooperstown Confidential: The wild life of George Brunet, by Bruce Markusen (Hardballtimes)

... We know plenty about the stars, the legends, the Hall of Famers. We know their stories; we enjoy hearing about them. But it is the journeymen, the less talented players who truly fascinate me. They seem to be the most colorful; they have to overcome the greatest adversities. Their stories are often the most compelling, if only we are willing to dig and search.

One of those journeymen who has intrigued me is George Brunet. I first became aware of him in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four. I then heard about his exploits, at an advanced age well into his 50s, in the Mexican League.

In every sense, Brunet was a baseball lifer, amply fulfilling the many cliches about southpaw eccentricities and emptying more than a few bottles along the way. His career in the big leagues was average at best, though good enough for parts of 15 seasons. Today, such longevity is awarded with millions.

But that's only the half of it, as Brunet played in the minors, majors and Mexican League for 37 consecutive years, from just after high school to the age of 54 -- from Eisenhower through George H.W. Bush.

All told, Brunet pitched more than 6,000 innings and set the minor league record for strikeouts (3,175). He finally retired in 1989. Remaining in Mexico, he died only two years later following a heart attack.

Markusen has it pegged. The journeymen among ballplayers are the most interesting, probably for the same reason Bull Durham is the best baseball movie.

It's all about the stories.

Why is Marvin Miller not a member of the baseball Hall of Fame?

In Jim Bouton's seminal Ball Four, he observes that the famously eccentric (and highly talented) genius/pitcher Mike Marshall once authored a university term paper titled "Baseball Is An Ass."

Marshall's paper would have been written during the mid-1960s, just before Curt Flood challenged the reserve clause -- and as the late Marvin Miller took the reins of the players union.

Quite simply, Miller belongs in the upper tier of most transformative figures in the history of baseball. Naturally, he isn't in the Hall of Fame, primarily because of the owners' resentment of a man who enabled them to garner unprecedented wealth by first forcing them to share some of it with the men on the field who made it all possible.

I've written about this several times, and it still gripes my cookies.

Baseball Hall of Fame as corrupted banana republic: Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth and (not) Marvin Miller.

Baseball. I love it, bit it's still an ass.

Baseball Union Chief Marvin Miller Awaits His Due, by Richard Sandomir (New York Times)

 ... But if (Curt) Flood, a center fielder, merited being honored for sacrificing his career for the labor rights that he believed all players deserved, the next logical question is: Why is Marvin Miller, the union chief who transformed the baseball players’ union into a fierce labor force, not a member of the Hall? Miller, who died in 2012, has been rejected by various veterans committees an absurd six times — five during his lifetime and the sixth in 2013 when his candidacy was spurned by at least 10 of the 16 voters who elected Bobby Cox, Tony La Russa and Joe Torre.