To Absent Friends - Jim Bouton

 

Jim Bouton

1939 - 2019

Jim Bouton died today at the age of 80, a victim of dementia.  He had what can best be described as a mediocre career (62-63 W-L, but a career ERA of 3.57 would make him an all-star in 2019).  He pitched in two World Series, compiling a 2-1 record and a 1.48 ERA, and from 1965 until 1977, he was the answer to this trivia question: Who was the last Yankee pitcher to win a World Series game?

Bouton will be remembered for none of that, however.  Rather, he will be remembered as the author of the book "Ball Four".  Published in 1970, it was a diary of his 1969 season with the expansion Seattle Pilots as he tried to come back from arm miseries and resurrect his once promising career.  It was a "warts and all" look at major league baseball and the men who played it, and it forever changed how sports are written about, and how we view the men and women who play them.

Drinking, drug abuse, carousing, womanizing, the unique sub-culture of "Baseball Annies", and some of the out and out inanities that populated the baseball culture back then (and probably still do) was new to a reading audience that like their sports heroes to to be "Aw, shucks" Frank Merriwell types.  Hell, the stuff he wrote about his manager in Seattle, Joe Shultz, might have been the best and funniest stuff in there.  Shultz hated it, but, face it, were it not for "Ball Four", Joe Shultz would be totally and completely forgotten today by anyone except his immediate family.

Nothing however, captured the fancy and raised the ire of the world more than what Bouton wrote about Mickey Mantle.

If anyone personified the All American Boy image in the 1950's and -60's, it was Mickey Mantle.  In "Ball Four", we learned that Mantle was a heavy drinker, often showed up to games when he knew he wasn't going to play drunk, a rampant womanizer, an occasional peeping Tom, and, oh yeah, he often told little kids seeking autographs to f--- off.   For exposing the feet of clay of America's baseball hero and for violating the so-called "sanctity of the clubhouse", Bouton had himself a best selling book, but he also was pretty much ostracized from baseball for the rest of his life.

Back in 2005, I reread "Ball Four" for the first time in decades.  I also read the Afterwords that Bouton wrote in two subsequent re-issues of the book over the years.  I then did  presentation for the Pittsburgh SABR Chapter called "Ball Four Revisited."  I opened my talk by saying that if someone under the age of forty or so were to read "Ball Four" for the first time in 2005 (or in 2019 that matter), the first thing that they would say is "What was all the fuss about?"  That is how much Bouton and "Ball Four" changed the landscape of how sports were reported upon and written about since its publication in 1970.  It is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, as to whether Bouton should be praised or damned for that.

In those Afterwords, Bouton talked about his life after "Ball Four."  He had some gigs in baseball, on radio and television, and even in the movies, but he was still viewed as a pariah, until George Steinbrenner invited him back, finally, to one of the Yankees old-timers events, where he was received warmly by the fans and the Yankee Family.  He also wrote of how he was able to make his peace with Mantle late in the Mick's life.  It was a sweet story.  

He also told the story of how he built a stone wall on his property in Connecticut, I believe, in his later years.  When he was done, he measured out the wall and found that it was exactly sixty feet, six inches long.  That may or may not be a true story, but if it isn't, it should be.

RIP Jim Bouton.