I couldn't agree more.
His death has really gutted me, as I always imagined I would contact him again to tell him how truly great his book is, and how much it meant to me personally.
However, I am not surprised he is viewed so kindly by baseball fans, as he is also held in very high esteem by non-fiction fans, social scientists, linguists, American studies professors, sports fans, librarians, teachers of reluctant readers, and so on. Ball Four is included on Time Magazine’s list of 100 all time best nonfiction books as well as the New York Library’s 100 Books of the Century, sharing that latter list with authors such as Hemingway, Galbraith, Kipling, and E.B. White.
“Don’t you think that’s a bit much?”, asked my wife recently.
No, goddamnit, I do not.
I am no literary critic, but it is clear that Ball Four has great value on many different levels. As a work of non-fiction, literary journalism or memoir, he has managed to honestly and accurately record a vital slice of the lives of the members of a truly rarified closed society in a way that had never been done before, (and not very much since.) To his credit, he has done so with a lens of warm admiration (arguably there is no bigger baseball fan than Jim Bouton), with an especially keen eye and appreciation for the often extreme humor, language, and camaraderie of these men. The actual chunk of history that he has recorded yielded a deeply American book, contrasting the culture’s century-old love and worship for these men and their institution, with the intensely personal and human realities that are behind the facade.
This came at a pretty steep price for him, as he pretty much had to commit professional suicide to do so. (Pete Rose: “Fuck you, Shakespeare!”) In 1970, Baseball was still very much “The National Pastime", and its players were held up as national heroes and honorable role models. His book exposed many of these public athletes as amphetamine-popping, skirt-chasing, hard drinking, profanely hilarious, overgrown boys. In other words, regular human beings. To the book's credit, the love he had for these men and their game has long stood the test of time. The initial shock of learning that Mickey Mantle was a flawed human being was quickly replaced with Bouton’s intended message: his awestruck appreciation of Mickey Mantle’s amazing athletic talent, which he teaches us, is actually far greater than his fans ever could have imagined. Ted Williams was almost correct: To hit a round ball with a round bat squarely, while hung over, is TRULY the hardest feat in sport.
For me, the greatest gift of Ball Four was that it forever recorded and celebrated the amazing and hilarious inside truths, customs, humor, and language of what it meant to be part of a baseball team. I will always cherish it for that reason.
An perfect example: when one considers Hall of Fame second baseman Joe Morgan, it is easy to be clouded by his tiresome and often inane TV color commentating career. You would be more lucky if you could remember the Big Red Machine Joe Morgan, who won MVP’s and terrified me as a kid with his menacing stare and arm twitching batting stance. (He absolutely killed the Sox in the '75 World Series). But all of that aside, don’t you feel a whole lot warmer about Joe Morgan after reading the September 1, 1969 passage about him from Ball Four?
Norm Miller was doing the broadcast bit in the fourth inning when Joe Morgan came back to the dugout after missing a big curve ball for strike three.
“Joe, Joe Morgan, may I have a word with you?”
“Sure, Norm, how’s it going?”
“Fine, Joe, fine. We wanted to ask you about that pitch you missed. What was it?”
“Norm, that was a motherfucking curve.”
“Can you tell our listeners, Joe, what’s the difference between a regular curve and a motherfucking curve?”
“Well, Norm, your regular curve has a lot of spin on it and you can recognize it real early. It breaks down a little bit, and out. Now, your motherfucker, that’s different. It comes in harder, looks like a fastball. Then all of a sudden it rolls off the top of the table and before you know it, it’s motherfucking strike three.”
“Thank you very much, Joe Morgan.”
To this day, this still makes me laugh and I can hear Joe Morgan saying this in his monotone voice. This is exactly what real baseball players are like. When I first read this as a kid, I not only laughed my ass off, but it made me like Joe Morgan just a little bit more. And it reminded me of many insane and hilarious things I'd seen in the dugout as a bat boy.
What a great and useful book.