Created for the 2023 All-Star Game Media Guide
I first met Jim Bouton in April 2004. What brought us together at the Bergen County Courthouse in Hackensack, New Jersey was an ESPN mock trial of the New York Yankees and their spending habits. We were to be “expert witnesses” in this televised silliness — along with Mike Torrez, Goose Gossage, Mike Veeck, and others; attorney for the prosecution was Alan Dershowitz, for the defense Bruce Cutler. The jury decided that after all the Yankees were not bad for baseball, but only a mock sigh of relief was evidenced in Hackensack or in the Bronx.
Before the proceedings commenced in earnest I had introduced myself to Jim, timidly. I had known about him for a long time, of course — beginning with a memorable game played on Sunday, June 24, 1962. He was a rookie with the Yankees; I was a teenager stuck at the home of my parents’ friends, with the TV my only friend. I turned on the Yankees game with Detroit and watched every pitch of what turned out to be a 22-inning New York victory, with Bouton throwing blanks for the final seven innings to claim the win when reserve outfielder Jack Reed hit the one and only home run of his big-league career.
Eyeing Jim in the makeshift “green room” of the courthouse, I was still that kid on the other side of the TV screen. What emboldened me to approach him was my knowledge of his ongoing efforts to bring baseball back to Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which had hosted baseball on that 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 news story.
A vintage baseball game followed at Wahconah Park on July 3, with nearly 5000 fans overflowing the confines of the park; it was televised live on ESPN. Jim pitched the last couple of innings for the Pittsfield Hillies, while Bill “Spaceman” Lee left his place at my side in the broadcast booth to bat for the Hartford Senators.
A Vintage Base Ball Federation followed, with games in a number of locations for several years (including Birmingham’s Rickwood Field, named as the site of a regular-season MLB contest on June 21, 2024). I was involved in all of it, but for me the principal benefit of reviving the old ball game was the friendship with Jim. Though we often got together with our wives for dinner at a favorite neighborhood restaurant, I confess to being star-struck still: not because Jim won twenty games for the Yankees a couple of times before I went off to college, nor because he was Seattle’s favorite son in the year I began my own career.
He was the man who wrote Ball Four, the best baseball book ever.
Jim was not the first baseball player to produce an autobiography, but he was one of the first to tell his own story without benefit of a ghost. Leonard Shecter, formerly a beat writer for the New York Post, shaped Jim’s audiotapes and scribbled notes into a cohesive narrative, but Jim was the writer, as all those in baseball knew. That’s why Pete Rose called out from the dugout, when Jim pitched against the Cincinnati Reds in 1970, “F — k you, Shakespeare.”
Bouton told ESPN in 2003: “The idea of Ball Four came to me after my first year in the minor leagues. I would spend all day long with a notebook in my pocket. I’d fill it with notes, sometimes the whole book in one day if it was a really good day. But then I’d run out of note paper and I’d write on whatever was available. If I was on an airplane I’d write on an air-sickness bag. If I was in the bullpen I’d write on a popcorn box, a peanut bag…. I was constantly writing. I was a writing maniac.”
Example: after pitching well in a minor-league game, Bouton wrote on Holiday Inn stationery: “In the clubhouse afterward I told some of the guys to remember the date because they had witnessed an historic occasion. The resurrection of my knuckler!”
Ball Four followed the big-league season of the Seattle Pilots, an expansion franchise to which Bouton was attached after several seasons of struggle in New York following an arm injury. He pitched effectively for Seattle, relying almost exclusively on the knuckleball he had discarded upon entering professional baseball back in 1959.
When a pre-publication excerpt of his book appeared in Look magazine in the spring of 1970, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn called Bouton, accompanied by Marvin Miller, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, into his office. He insisted that the book’s publication be halted — an impossibility — and then asked that Bouton apologize and recant parts of his work, perhaps shifting blame to Shecter. Jim refused.
Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues (to cite its full title) had become a bestseller and was his ticket to new ventures. After half a season pitching for the Houston Astros and then a brief stint with their farm club in Oklahoma City, he retired from the game. He proceeded to lead an improvisational life: sportscasting for two New York City news stations; acting as a McGovern delegate at the 1972 Democratic convention; playing bad guy Terry Lennox in director Robert Altman’s 1973 film The Long Goodbye; and writing and acting in a televised sitcom version of Ball Four.
He wrote other books, including I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally, a response to the critics of Ball Four. Most importantly, in my view, he updated Ball Four in each of the next three decades. Ball Four Plus Ball Five (1981) covered his amazing comeback as a starter with the Atlanta Braves in 1978 after pitching semi-pro and minor-league ball. A 20th anniversary edition in 1990 contained a substantial epilogue, as did Ball Four: The Final Pitch (2000). Taken together, the four volumes provide a candid, sometimes heartbreaking extended memoir without parallel in American literature.
I think this was part of the reasoning behind the New York Public Library’s selection of Ball Four as one of its Books of the Century, the only sports title. Bouton thus stood shoulder to shoulder with such world figures as Anton Chekov, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Ball Four,” the editors noted, “was the first ripple of a tidal wave of ‘tell-all’ books that have become commonplace not only in sports, but also in politics, entertainment, and other realms of contemporary life.”
David Halberstam wrote at the time of Ball Four’s initial publication:
As the book is deeply in the American vein, so is the reaction against it. The sportswriters are not judging the accuracy of the book, but Bouton’s right to tell (that is, your right to read), which is, again, as American as apple pie or the White House press corps.
There was a time, a long time, when Jim had few friends in baseball or its allied industries. But after he made public, in 2017, that he had been suffering with a form of dementia, cerebral amyloid angiopathy, all that was past. The Yankees welcomed him at Old-Timers’ Day in 2018 after a long absence.
On July 8, 2019, the Library of Congress announced its acquisition of his papers, consisting of 37,000 items in 142 containers (https://bit.ly/3NToVEu). His wife, Paula Kurman, advised him of this but the end was nigh, only two days away, and he may not have grasped the magnitude of the honor. As the Library spokesman said, “More than a baseball book, Ball Four became a monument to a tempestuous time in American history.”
It was the capstone to Jim Bouton’s serendipitous, improvisational life. But baseball was always at the core. The close of the book became his, and maybe the game’s, most famous line: “You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out it was the other way around all the time.”
[This story recaps bits from some prior ones I wrote about my friend.]
Jim Bouton, Seattle Pilot was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.