Ball Four — Jim Bouton

Paperback - 20th Anv edition (July 1990)

Macmillan; ISBN: 0020306652

Ball Four has been around a while now, and my hunch is that most baseball fans have read it. I never did, although I felt as if I read it, because over the last 28 years, I've read so much about it, and so many quotes or stories from it. When I finally got to it, on my Adirondack vacation, I devoured it in two days (the 20th anniversary edition is over 450 pages.) It was a quick read, and a very good one.

The humor of BF holds up well. Anyone who has worked in an organization with supervisors (coaches, managers), middle-managers (GMs) and CEO/bosses (owners) can relate to BF as easily as to a Dilbert cartoon. In Bouton's teammates, we will also see our fellow coworkers or friends or neighbors -- and a bit of ourselves.

It is hard to believe there was a time when Mickey Mantle was not as well known to fans for his hard drinking, as well as his hard hitting. Yet when Bouton wrote about The Mick (and others) as less than saintly role models, he caught a lot of flak. Bouton's observations of ballplayers stupid or superstitious, managers authoritarian to a fault, and owners clueless about how to treat or pay their employees fairly, are now familiar to us all, and no longer unique.

A review of Ball Four would be less interesting here, I think, than some reflections from a fan who was also keeping a journal of sorts back then. I appreciate the difficulty of making daily notes, of sorting out what is worth recording from what isn't, and of deciding exactly how honest to be. A journalist is also a writer tempted to interpret as well as to tell, and his end product will inevitably contain a self-portrait. When the journal is destined to be a book, a lot of editing is omitting.

I give BF high marks as a journal, however. Bouton can see his own faults fine, and can laugh at himself as well as others, and that is important for credibility. In the 1980 and 1990 updates, Bouton talks some about his divorce, when he might have left readers with the picture of himself as a fine husband and father (one son adopted from Korea.)

Those who were upset by how they were portrayed in BF have mostly themselves to blame -- Bouton's sharpest lampoons are quotes he could have made up, but likely just wrote down. But their objections have some validity. If Bouton had brought a videocam into the dugout and bullpen and locker room, had his teammates and others known they were "on stage," they certainly would have acted and spoken differently. Well, some would. I was more bothered by the several times when Bouton revealed the name of a source of information, after promising not to, as if it was somehow OK because he was doing it in a book.

While much of BF is timeless, some of it is pure 1969. The main event that summer was not the Miracle Mets (sorry) or the moon landing, but the Vietnam War. If Bouton is one of the more enlightened baseball people, then Vietnam was about a zillion miles from the country of baseball. The civil rights movement hit closer, there are blacks and Hispanics on every team by 1969, and Bouton's comparison between the degree of integration on the expansion Seattle Pilots, and the Houston Astros, makes me wish Bouton had a chance to visit every clubhouse that season.

My own recollection has the nation more painfully divided on both the war, and on race -- and blacks very divided on the latter. It was a tense summer, and the gaps between not only the generations, but between students and coworkers were very real --I was there --and this must have been true of ball clubs.

Bouton does record accurately something that frequently put these gaps in the spotlight -- and that would be the way that men were judged back then by their hair. The line from the rock-musical Hair! was, as we used to say, right on: "'Cause I look different, they think I'm subversive." There was some truth in that, of course, letting one's hair grow long was a form of protest, and ballplayers who resisted their managers' hints to visit the barber, were placing their roster spot at risk. But Bouton is adept at noting the hypocrisy at work, when players with hot bats or low ERAs are left alone.

All the ingredients for the eventual civil war between players and owners can be seen in BF. Marvin Miller had not yet arrived, and not all players were disposed to welcome him or any union. But the greed and lack of compassion on the part of the owners (this was long before players could be greedy) made the later conflicts inevitable. In 1969, players would have been satisfied with decent and fair raises (a few thousand per year) and less regimentation (curfew checks), and probably the whole Players Association thing never would have happened if each team had just put a keg in their clubhouse and kept it flowing.

Ball Four seems like a book that, like history itself, will not go quietly away. It survives because in the end, Jim Bouton is a baseball fan. The original book ended this way: "You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time." The Seattle Pilots are an unexceptional team, and while the Astros were better in 1969, few of the names will be familiar to today's rookie fans -- Joe Morgan, Larry Dierker -- and Jim Bouton.

You know a book is worth reading, when the Commish (Bowie Kuhn at the time) asks the author to say it ain't so. It is easy to see Bud Selig making the same request (unfortunately), but it is too late: Ball Four is part of the game now. And I think, in the long run, it's for the better.

Gene "Two Finger" Carney

Summer of ’49 — David Halberstam

Paperback - Reissue edition (February 1997)

Avon; ISBN: 0380710757

My highest compliment for any publication, books included, is that I read it "cover to cover." Since I finish most books I pick up, I must add a corollary: the compliment is heightened in direct proportion to the time that the distance between covers takes. In plain English, if I can't put a book down, and finish it in a few days, that's some book. Well, Summer of '49, by David Halberstam, nine years old now, is some book.

I was surprised that I enjoyed it so much, given my prejudice against the inordinate attention things Yankee and Red Sox have been given over the years, particularly in the world of books. But I knew going in, that's what this book was all about.

In fact, I enjoyed learning more about the New York and Boston media, particularly the newspapers of that day. Summer put some flesh on the skeleton of notions I had about Ted's feud with them and Joe D's myth-makers. Halberstam included "the standard joke" about the Boston tabloids' parochialism and sensationalism: World War III would be reported like this:

At first the digressions from the telling of the tale of the pennant race in progress, into player profiles, bothered me, but after I decided that they were the book's meat and potatoes, they were more pleasurable. Summer filled in many gaps in my knowledge about both rosters, as men like Dom DiMaggio and Tommy Henrich, Ellis Kinder and Vic Raschi, and dozens more, were brought to life.

I was born in '46 and do not remember a world without TV, so Halberstam's history of this invention's coming of age was appreciated. The first TVs, in bars, drew beer -drinking fans. When TVs invaded the average household, baseball helped sell sixpacks to fans who could now watch and imbibe in suburbia.

If this was a book just out, I would be moved to add at least another page here, of quotable quotes and anecdotes. However, I am sure that many of you have read Summer of '49, and are probably halfway through Halberstam's book just out, Summer of '64. So I will add only a few observations.

One is very timely. Summer reminds its readers about the feel of a pennant race. In '49, of course, it went down to a do or-die final game between the two top teams in the AL. But the pressure of a pennant race is as real as the heat of August, the arrival of a rookie for the final months, an injury to a regular player, and the wear-and-tear on pitching staffs. All these realities were ripped away from us this summer, making the "postseason" awards a bit hollow. I'm not with those who would withhold the awards, but the fact is that we will never know how anyone might have done in the eight-plus weeks remaining in 1994. Computers cannot tell us a thing about the pressure of a pennant race, nor can any writer who takes it upon him/herself to project a finish for '94 (and no doubt many will try.)

The other is also timely. Summer gives us snapshots of life as it was in MLB, before free-agency -- or agency, for that matter. (Halberstam has a story about Yogi Berra having the first agent, who arranged for speaking engagements that brought in more than the customary wrist-watch.) For the Yankees, that life included dealing with the penny-pincher George Weiss, and you get the idea that the Yankees were driven to win all those pennants and World Series for Casey because they were starving for cash. Tom Yawkey was very different, and you get the idea that life on the Boston plantation was more endurable, though less driven.

Summer of '49 is anything but nostalgic fluff. Sure the players loved the game, and its perks, but they also loved the money and the fame, the recognition at Toots Shor's. Once you meet individuals in any group, generalization is tougher, because now you know all the exceptions: not all of the players caroused, not all hated Weiss, not all put DiMaggio and Williams on pedestals. A sad note for me in Summer was sounded by the arrival of a new generation of players, which was not that interested in the older generation, or in learning much more about the game they played. That may be a theme of every summer, and every game.