Ball Four: Jim Bouton

Originally published in 1970 by The World Publishing Company, and limited to 5000 copies. There have been reprints since, including the famous knuckleballed-cover of the 1971 Dell paperback. Stein and Day also put out a paperback edition in 1990, and the Easton Press released a collector's leather edition in 2001.
"Ball Four" is at the top of nearly every list of best baseball books. It was one of the first to offer a uncensored (well, mostly uncensored) look past the base paths and into the clubhouses of Major League Baseball. The book spawned a series of spin-offs including "Ball Four Plus Ball Five," "Foul Ball," "Strike Zone," and the latest, "Ball Four The Final Pitch." The following is an excerpt from a Look Magazine article that appeared just as the book hit the shelves.

My Love/Hate Affair with Baseball
Ex-Yankee star Jim Bouton's sizzling diary
Excerpts from Look Magazine (June 2, 1970)

November 15, 1968
I signed my contract today to play for the new expansion-born Seattle Pilots at a salary of $22,000. It was a letdown because there was no bargaining. In the old days, before I became a 30-year old veteran trying to hold on with a knuckleball, a freaky pitch that is almost as difficult to throw as it is to catch, signing a contract was a yearly adventure.

The biggest adventure came in the spring of 1964, after I'd won 21 games for the New York Yankees with an overpowering fast ball. I'd taken down a big $10,500 for that bit of work and was determined to get $20,000. The man I dealt with was Ralph Houk, the manager, who was then in his brief time as general manager.

He offered me $15,500. Houk can look as sincere as hell with those big blue eyes of his, and when he calls you "ponder," it's hard to argue with him. He said the reason he was willing to give me such a big raise right off was that he wanted to give me a top salary, more than any second-year pitcher had ever made with the Yankees, and forget it.

"How many guys have you had who won 21 games in their second year?" I asked him.

He said he didn't know. And despite all the "ponders," I didn't sign.

This was around January 15. I didn't hear from Houk again until two weeks before spring training, when he came up another thousand. This was definitely final.

I said it wasn't final for me, I wanted $20,000.

"You can't make twenty," Houk said. "We never double contracts. It's a rule."

It's a rule he made up right there, I'd bet. Once again, I didn't sign.

The day before spring training, Houk offered me $18,500. I told him I might have considered signing for that, except the Yankees had forced me to work for so little the year before that it had become a matter of principle. The Yankees had their rules, I had my principles.

Two weeks into spring training, I was still a holdout and enjoying every minute of it. The phone never stopped ringing, and I was busy explaining to reporters all around the country why I was holding out, giving them all the figures.

I don't think Houk liked that. Anyway, on March 8, he called me and said he was going to deduct $100 a day from his offer for every day I held out beyond March 10. It amounted to a fine for not signing. "Oh no, it's not a fine," Houk said. "I don't believe in fining people."

Frantic, I called Joe Cronin, president of the American League. Could Houk legally fine me that way? Cronin said, "Walk around the block, then go back in and talk some more." With that encouragement, I chickened out. I signed.

I shouldn't have. If I held out, I probably would have gotten my figure. I could tell from the negative reaction Houk got in the press. And I got a lot of letters from distinguished citizens and season-ticket holders, all of them outraged at Houk. I think that's when Ralph Houk started hating me.

February 26, 1969
Reported to the Seattle Pilots' spring camp today in Tempe, Ariz. As soon as I got to the park, I went right over to General Manager Marvin Milkes' office, and we shook hands and he asked me if I had a nice flight. He also said:

"There's been a lot of things said about the players' strike, and I know you've said some things about it, but we're going to forget all that and start fresh. We have a new team, and everybody starts with a clean slate. I'm giving some people a new opportunity. I've got a man in the organization who is a former alcoholic. I've even got a moral degenerate that I know of. But we're going to let bygones be bygones."

As I left, I wondered where, on a scale of one to ten, a guy who talks a lot falls between a former alcoholic and a moral degenerate.

March 5
Mickey Mantle announced his retirement the other day, and I got to thinking about the mixed feelings I've always had about him. On the one hand, I really liked his sense of humor and his boyishness, the way he'd spend all that time in the clubhouse making up involved games of chance, and the pools he got up on golf matches and the Derby and things like that.

I once invested a dollar when Mantle raffled a ham, I won, only there was no ham. That was one of the hazards of entering a game of chance Mickey explained.

I also remember the time I won my first game. It was a shutout against the Washington Senators, in which I walked seven guys and gave up seven hits and had to pitch from a stretch position the whole game. When it was over, I walked into the clubhouse, and there was a path of white towels from the door to my locker, and just as I opened the door, Mickey was putting the last towel down in place. I'll never forget him for that.

On the other hand, there were all those times he'd push little kids aside when they wanted his autograph, and the times when he was snotty to reporters, just about making them crawl and beg for a minute of his time. I've seen him slam a bus window on kids trying to get his autograph. And I hated that look of his, when he'd get angry at somebody and cut him down with a glare.

March 11

Steve Barber was in the training room today getting some diathermy on his shoulders. He says his arm doesn't hurt. Ballplayers learn after a while that you don't tell anybody if you have an injury if you can possibly avoid it, even a teammate. It might get back to the coaches, get spread around and be blown out of all proportion. More important, you don't want to admit it to yourself.

March 28

Wayne Comer, our right-handed-hitting outfield hope, got into an argument with an umpire, and they were jawing back and forth. The last thing the umpire said was, "All right, Comer. You'll be sorry you said that."

And he probably will. Umpires do get even with people, even good umpires. I remember when George Scott first came up to the Red Sox. He must have irritated Ed Runge somehow, because the word came out from Elston Howard that when Runge was behind the plate and Scott was hitting, the strikes wouldn't have to be too good. The first pitch I threw to Scott was about six inches off the plate. Strike one. The second pitch was eight inches outside. Strike two. The third pitch was a curve in the dirt. Scott swung and missed. He never had a chance.

April 14

I got sent to Vancouver tonight. My first reaction: outrage. Second reaction: Omigod! How am I going to tell my wife? The problems. Where to live? How to get rid of the place we'd already signed a lease on in Seattle. What would happen to the $650 deposit? Moving again. Again. And we just got here.

But mostly outrage.

We'd lost a 2-1 game to Kansas City when Sal Maglie came over and said, "Joe wants to see you in his office."

My heart started racing. I mean Joe never wants to see me anywhere. So I knew. At the same time, I thought, "Nah, it's too early. I've really pitched only once. How can they tell anything from that? Maybe it's a trade. Or maybe he's sore at something I've done. Let's see, what have I done lately?"

It takes a lot longer to tell it than to think it. As soon as I got into his office, Joe Schultz said, "I hate to tell you a thing like this after such a close loss."

I almost laughed in his face. As though I'd be so heartbroken over losing a lousy ball game that I couldn't bear anything more, even a small thing like being sent to the minors.

Copyright notice: Excerpted from Look Magazine, June 2 1970, which excerpts Ball Four published by The World Publishing Co. ©1970. All rights reserved.

The Suitors of Spring: Pat Jordan

Thanks to Alex Belth, I recently started enjoying Pat Jordan's work. Well, that's not entirely true. It turns out that I have read a ton of his Sports Illustrated articles over the years, and thanks to The Vault, you can too. Jordan was a can't-miss pitching prospect who missed, luckily for us, as he turned to writing and ended up as a literary giant with thousands of stories and eleven published books. "The Suitors of Spring" is a collection of some of Jordan's early SI articles, some autobiographical.
It was originally published by Dodd and Mead in 1973, then a 1974 Warner paperback edition. If you're interested in more, stop by patjordanstories.com, there's a bunch of material there, including links to all of his SI stories.

The bird dogs came first. They just appeared one spring day in your sophomore year of high school as if drawn by odor of freshly cut outfield grass. On that day you knew for sure that your fastball, which had slowed considerably in the jump from a Little League to a high school mound, had once again begun to smoke like a burning pine. You knew also that your life would never be the same again. Baseball was no longer a game for you from that day forward. It was, instead, your career.

They were called bird dogs because they sniffed out talent, although the name does not do justice to the men. The bird dogs were kindly old men in plaid shirts and string ties. They owned taverns and hardware stores, and once had even played ball with Kiki Cuyler and Georgie Cutshaw. Now in their last years, they measured out the weekday afternoons at an endless succession of high school baseball games. They were always easy to spot, even from the mound, since few adults bothered to watch the meaningless games your coach let you pitch as a sophomore and because they always stood directly behind the home-plate screen, as if they would not feel comfortable unless viewing the world through a maze of wire triangles.

Copyright notice: Excerpted from chapter one of The Suitors of Spring, published by Dodd and Mead. ©1973. All rights reserved.

Summer of '49: David Halberstam

Originally published by William Morrow & Co in 1989, 50 years after the book's featured season. Other editions include the Morrow Co.'s Avon paperback edition, a fine Easton Press leather edition, and a Harper Perennial Modern Classics soft cover edition. Halberstam writes about the 1949 season, one that featured a fantastic Yankees-Red Sox pennant race. The book uses post-World War II America as a backdrop to its storytelling, suggesting that the game of baseball, and specifically this season, were paramount in healing American wounds.

Summer of '49 by David Halberstam

Chapter One

In the years immediately following World War II, professional baseball mesmerized the American people as it never had before and never would again. Baseball, more than almost anything else, seemed to symbolize normalcy and a return to life in America as it had been before Pearl Harbor. The nation clearly hungered for that. When Bob Feller returned from the navy to pitch in late August 1945, a Cleveland paper headlined the event: THIS IS WHAT WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR.

All the prewar stars were returning to action--DiMaggio, Williams, Feller, and Stan Musial--and their very names seemed to indicate that America could pick up right where it had left off. They were replacing wartime players of lesser quality. Indeed, a player named George (Cat) Metkovich spoke for many of the wartime players when he told his Boston teammates at the end of the 1945 season, "Well, boys, better take a good took around you, because most of us won't be here next year."

The crowds were extraordinary-large, enthusiastic, and, compared with those that were soon to follow, well behaved. In the prewar years the Yankees, whose teams had included Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio, claimed that they drew I million fans at home each season. In fact, they had not drawn that well. The real home attendance was more likely to have been around 800,000. After the war the crowds literally doubled. In 1941, the last year of prewar baseball, the National League drew 4.7 million fans; by 1947 the figure had grown to 10.4 million. In the postwar years the Yankees alone drew more than 2 million fans per season at home.

Nor was it just numbers. There was a special intensity to the crowdsin those days. When the Red Sox played the Yankees in the Stadium, they traveled to New York by train, passing through Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Everyone seemed to know the schedule of their train, and as it passed through endless small towns along the route, there would be large crowds gathered at the stations to cheer the players, many of the people holding up signs exhorting their heroes to destroy the hated Yankees. The conductor would deliberately slow the train down and many of the players, on their way to do battle with the sworn enemy, would come out on the observation decks to wave to the crowds.

Near the end of the 1946 season, a young Red Sox pitcher named Dave Ferriss went into Yankee Stadium to pitch and was stunned by the size of the crowd: 63,000 people, according to the newspapers, even though at the time the Red Sox held a sizable lead over the Yankees. Ferriss had only recently left a tiny town in the Mississippi Delta. That day he was so awed by the noise and tumult that in the middle of the game he decided to commit the scene to memory and take it with him for the rest of his life. He stepped off the mound, turned slowly to the stands, and inhaled the crowd. Ferriss thought to himself. How magnificent it all is. This is the Red Sox and this is the Yankees. I am twenty-four, and I am pitching in Yankee Stadium, and every seat is taken.

With the exception of the rare heavyweight fight or college football game that attracted national attention, baseball dominated American sports entertainment. Professional football, soon to become a major sport because its faster action so well suited the television camera, was still a minorleague ticket; golf and tennis were for the few who played those sports.

Rich businessmen, thinking about becoming owners of sports teams, did not yet talk about the entertainment dollar, for America was a Calvinistic nation, not much given to entertaining itself. In the world of baseball, the sport itself was vastly more important than such ancillary commercial sources of revenue as broadcasting, endorsements, concessions, and parking.

There were only sixteen teams in the big leagues, and in an America defined by the railroad instead of the airplane, St. Louis was a far-west team and Washington a Southern one. California might as well have been in another country. The pace of life in America had not yet accelerated as it was soon to do from the combination of endless technological breakthroughs and undreamed--of affluence in ordinary homes. The use of drugs seemed very distant. The prevailing addiction of more than a few players (and managers, coaches, sportswriters, and indeed owners) was alcohol, apparently a more acceptable and less jarring form of selfdestruction. It was, thought Curt Gowdy, a young sportscaster who had just joined the Yankees, the last moment of innocence in American life.

Baseball was rooted not just in the past but in the culture of the country; it was celebrated in the nation's literature and songs. When a poor American boy dreamed of escaping his grim life, his fantasy probably involved becoming a professional baseball player. It was not so much the national sport as the binding national myth.

It was also the embodiment of the melting-pot theory, or at least the white melting pot theory, of America. One of its preeminent players, Joe DiMaggio, was the son of a humble immigrant fisherman, and the fact that three of the fisherman's sons had made the major leagues proved to many the openness and fairness of American society. America cheered the DiMaggio family, and by so doing, proudly cheered itself When DiMaggio played in his first World Series, his mother traveled by train to watch him play. She was a modest woman, but open and candid, and she became something of a celebrity herself by telling reporters (in Italian) that the trip was hard for her because there was so little to do in New York--she wished there was some cleaning, or at least some dishes to wash and dry.

Copyright notice: Excerpted from chapter one of Summer of '49, published by William Morrow. ©1989. All rights reserved.