BALL FOUR QUIZ
1) Whom did Bouton say got thrown out of a game deliberately on the last day of the 1960 season because he had a flight to catch?
A) Frank Robinson B) Frank Howard C) Frank Thomas D) Frank Lary
2) Who told Bouton, as a boy, to "Take a hike, son," when Bouton asked him for an autograph?
A) Alvin Dark B) Wes Westrum C) Whitey Lockman D) Eddie Stanky
3) Which rookie catcher got a broken finger volunteering to catch Bouton’s warm-up knuckleball?
A) Larry Haney B) Gerry McNertney C) Merritt Ranew D) Bob Watson E) Greg Goossen
4) Which superstar did Bouton characterize as "loafing" on a groundball?
A) Willie Mays B) Carl Yastrzemski C) Brooks Robinson D) Harmon Killebrew
5) Which teammate of Bouton’s claimed never to wear underwear?
A) George Brunet B) Mickey Mantle C) Ralph Terry D) Jimmy Wynn
6) Between innings of shutting out the Giants, which White Album song did Larry Dierker sing?
A) I Will B) Helter Skelter C) Long Long Long D) Rocky Raccoon
7) Who hit his first big-league HR off Bouton?
A) Tony Oliva B) Bill Freehan C) Curt Blefary D) Reggie Jackson
8) When the Yankees and the Pilots got into a brawl, which ex-teammate did Bouton have a fake-fistfight with?
A) Fritz Peterson B) Joe Pepitone C) Al Downing D) Tom Tresh
9) Whom did Bouton say resembled a white rat?
A) Whitey Ford B) Claude Osteen C) Claude Raymond D) Whitey Herzog
10) Which former World Series star did Bouton see driving a bus at the 1964 World’s Fair?
A) Bob Turley B) Dusty Rhodes C) Gil McDougald D) Don Newcombe
I miss making up multiple-choice quizzes. (So far, it’s the only part of teaching I miss.) To make grading easy, I always made the answer key easy to memorize (the key here is DAD BAD CABB), allowing me to race through the quizzes in the time it takes to read those three words and write a letter grade. (I mostly used them to take attendance, as required by NY state, and to keep the students prepared to discuss the book on the syllabus that day—nothing was as grueling, for them and for me, as those horrible hours I’d have to spend asking questions about a book nobody had even bought yet, much less read.) Fortunately, on BJOL, I can depend on having a bunch of dedicated readers who’ve devoured BALL FOUR, some readers several times over the five decades it’s been in print.
I own four copies myself, all updated with new forewords, afterwords, prefaces, epilogues, introductions, apparatuses, photos—Bouton was more gifted at marketing than he was at pitching, or at least as enthusiastic about each of his two chosen professions. When I reviewed Mitchell Nathanson’s spanking-new biography a few weeks ago, though, I mostly ignored the book for which Bouton is better known than he’s known for his pitching or his marketing talents, mainly because Nathanson’s point was how little Bouton’s life story (as opposed to how much of his fame) had to do with BALL FOUR.
It was a fair point. If he were really the social leper that critics made him out to be, then BALL FOUR would merely be one skin lesion on Bouton’s entire disfigured body. He led a varied, troubled, contentious life, and BALL FOUR was only a sliver of it. Nonetheless, I’d like to pay it a little attention here, if only because I think his book is remembered more for the effect it had rather than its actual content.
Its content was the day-to-day life of a ballplayer, as it was happening. This content was shocking, for its time, but from our perspective, the shock value has completely disappeared. The controversy, for example, of athletes popping pills to help them perform better is now taken for granted, but back then it was a revelation, and not a popular one. "How dare Bouton reveal that players pop amphetamines like they were Tic-tacs? And is it even true? Is Bouton making up sensational stuff just to boost book sales?" are all bland questions now, undeserving of our effort to answer.
A lot of other controversies have died down, so when I read it again this week, I paid very little attention to the greenie-popping, the beaver-shooting, the alcoholism, the Baseball Shirley stuff. The entirety of baseball culture has changed, probably for the better. Bouton returns to the locker-room one day (July 15th) to find that his equipment has been vandalized, almost certainly by a teammate. His jockstraps have all been stretched out, his spikes have had nails driven into them, and he takes it as a good-natured prank, which it is, in jock culture, but it’s also an act of raw hostility, which is how it would be taken today. (The vandal, a huge pitcher named Gene Brabender, deceives Bouton by saying that he witnessed the vandalism but won’t reveal the vandal’s name, which, Bouton learns months afterwards, is "Gene Brabender.") Bouton is disliked by most of his teammates on the Seattle Pilots, which is the most intriguing quality of Ball Four to me, how it feels to be a part of an organization that has contempt for you. Bouton’s "social leper" phase, in other words, is actually well underway before Ball Four was published—he was a company man who understood that his company had a very limited use for him, and almost no sentimental attachment to him at all.
This was the book’s great truth—not that Jim Bouton could treat his teammates, past, present and future, with such little care for them, but that they, and the teams themselves, had so little care for Bouton’s well-being, and he didn’t mind sharing that truth with his readers. This is a primer about an isolated, alienated worker, more than anything else, revealing his working conditions.
The revelations about salary negotiations in the final period of a total power-imbalance between teams and players was shocking at the time because players were enjoined from saying what their salaries even were. The popular illusion was that MLB players played the game mostly for enjoyment, and the players often fostered that illusion. (One quote from the young Willie Mays sticks with me: "Heck, man, it’s jes’ a game—I love it.") Today, as we argue about the fine print of each player’s contract, and as their every dollar, bonus, perk, and clause is a matter of public record, the idea that Bouton would reveal (in Ball Four’s opening sentence) the amount of his annual salary seems like nothing to us, but it was treated as a betrayal at the time.
A betrayal of what, exactly? Well, Bouton was perceived—by revealing his own salary!!—as pressuring other players to confess to their own salaries, which were criminally low even for the time, and are comically low by contemporary standards. Simply, the owners were enjoying the perception that players were generously paid (which they were, but only in comparison with most wage-slaves) instead of being shamefully underpaid and grossly exploited. Bouton’s openness in discussing figures helped to bring about the badly needed change in perception.
MLB players, in other words, were hewing to a Thin Blue Line of their own, an omerta to keep within the walls of the clubhouse some ugly truths about the game, and about American culture more generally. As tasteless as it was considered to disclose your own salary, most of Bouton’s teammates bought into those standards of taste that were, of course, contrary to their own interests. Bouton questioned the whole concept of "good taste" and was ostracized for it, but most of what he questioned seems, to us today, to have been highly questionable.
I was interested to read last week an article about Gregg Jefferies https://usagag.com/gregg-jefferies-complicated-mets-failure-looks-different-now/, who was despised by his New York Mets teammates of the 1990s and virtually driven from the team by a group of veterans who, in this recent article, admit that Jeffries did nothing to warrant the abuse he took. The veterans (Ron Darling, Keith Hernandez, Daryl Strawberry, among others) resented the young Jeffries for replacing one of them, Wally Backman, and took their resentment out on Jeffries rather han on the Mets’ upper management who were, of course, the ones who decided to give Backman’s playing time to Jefferies. Instead, the Mets’ vets focused on the young player’s predictably immature behavior and hazed him to the breaking point, which only resulted in more immature behavior, causing the Mets to lose a young star and ultimately to fall into total disarray.
This hazing of a potential superstar occurred about 30 years ago, and it seems a relic of a barbaric era, but it also occurred about 20 years after the events of Ball Four, when the veteran Bouton (a 30-year-old former All-Star, World’s Champion, etc.) was mistreated by his own teammates. The book describes a very distant primitive culture, and as such is an important historical document, one of the few honest accounts of a jockocracy that has already been replaced several times, and which will be replaced again, inevitably, in the years to come. The Bouton of Ball Four took it in the spirit of the time as good-natured ribbing, sometimes as foul-natured ribbing, but never as categorically despicable behavior, which in the context of 2020, much of the hazing he (or Jefferies) received would have been.
To be fair, Bouton often displays bad behavior in Ball Four, not only by his teammates (especially on the Pilots, less so on the Astros) but by himself. At one point, he bawls out the pitchers and catchers in the bullpen in a tirade that might be characterized as petulant and self-centered, though Bouton feels his remarks are both warranted and long overdue. A few days afterwards, however, he apologizes to his teammates for losing his cool, and they accept his apology. It would have been easy for Bouton to have downplayed the incident, perhaps even omitted it, or paraphrased his remarks to make them seem milder than they were, but he quotes himself at length behaving poorly, which was a theme not widely noted by critics of the book. He was easily as self-critical as he was critical of his fellow players.
Bouton knew that he acted like a prima donna from time to time, because that’s one of the main points of the book: athletes, especially very successful athletes, grow accustomed to being treated generally far more gently than most people get treated. He tells of one catcher who pulls his car into the "DOCTORS ONLY" parking spot at a hospital where he’s signing autographs for sick children, and notes that the catcher’s car is never in danger of getting towed, as yours or mine would be if we ever dared to park in such a spot; rather, the worst the catcher has to fear is someone asking him to please pay more attention in the future to signage. When you put 25 men who have been coddled and privileged and advantaged all their lives into a single locker room, conflict will inevitably bubble up now and then, whenever one of them notices another one getting a privilege he thinks belongs instead to him, which happens about three times every hour.
Bouton, like all athletes, thinks the world revolves around him, and throughout Ball Four he makes clear his mission is to get the optimal training, optimal workload, optimal consideration from those in charge (managers and coaches) wherever he can—he bristles at the rules and limitations enforced by those in charge, and the impression he leaves is that he dislikes and mistrusts all managers and coaches, so much so that he feels the need to dispel that impression:
"Joe Schultz. I’m afraid I’m giving the impression that I don’t like him or that he’s bad for the ballclub. Neither is true." (April 19)
The truth is that the club (in this case, Schultz’s Pilots) cannot run according to Bouton’s optimal principles, which Bouton knows, but still must push them in the direction that is closest to his own personal needs. Like most ballplayers, if he doesn’t get his best training, practice, workouts, in-game use, and he loses his MLB job as a result, he has only himself to blame, so he tries to get his needs met, often in obnoxious ways. But because he argues well, and is an especially stubborn cuss, he alienates his managers, his catchers, and his other teammates from time to time, and that’s another important theme of Ball Four: alienation.
Baseball is a team game but, to be effective, every player must look for his own needs to be met, and the alienation that results creates the picture of Bouton that pitted him against his own managers and teammates. Bouton was used very badly by his first team, the Yankees, who got rid of him as soon as it was clear that he could no longer help the team. (He blew out a muscle in his pitching arm.) And he describes his Yankees managers, Ralph Houk, Yogi Berra and Johnny Keane, as inept, duplicitous, clueless, thoughtless, and foolish, while acknowledging that some of that is simply an inevitable part of the job of manager: baseball teams are just too large, and the manager is given too much responsibility to run every bit of it with maximum efficiency and sensitivity.
As little fondness as he shows towards Ralph Houk, for example, at one point he finds himself (on August 3, 1969, years after Houk has banished him to Seattle) alone on the field talking to him. Bouton reminds Houk that he’d like to play for him again, if he ever got the chance, and Houk tells him, "I’ll definitely keep that in mind." This isn’t (just) sucking up to someone who has the power to rehire Bouton, but rather an acknowledgment that Houk, and all his managers, has a tough job to do and does it well at times. At another point, Bouton remembers a conversation with Houk on the bench, as he waited to face Don Drysdale in the 1963 World Series: when Bouton remarked, "Whether I win today or lose, this sure is a helluva lot of fun," and instead of bawling him out with "What do you mean ‘lose’? We’re gonna win," Houk assures him he knows exactly what he means. There are all sorts of such quiet moments where Bouton connects with the people who, after the book came out, never spoke to him, or about him, with anything other than hostility and disgust. All in all, he’s rather fond of the managers and coaches he’s in constant conflict with, and often paints a sympathetic picture of them
Nonetheless, readers and critics came away from the book with the impression that Bouton ridiculed his managers, which he did but only the context of previous sports books, which tended to describe each manager as more brilliant than each other manager. "Wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful" is Bouton’s characterization of most big leaguers’ typical comments about teammates and managers.
Overall, what emerges from the book is Bouton’s breadth of thought. He speculates on a wide variety of subjects that most players can’t even express in words: child-rearing, especially of the Korean boy he and his wife have adopted, or the absurd emphasis that baseball placed on conformity of clothing and hair-styling. Shortly after he got traded to Houston, he was joined there by his former Pilots teammate Tommy Davis, who confides in him how the Pilots staff spoke of him behind his back, describing him as a "weirdo" and mocking his peculiarities to other Pilots. (Davis also tells him about Brabender’s duplicity in destroying Bouton’s equipment and claiming to have witnessed it but not to having done it.) Steve Hovley, a Pilots outfielder who wore his hair a little shaggy and who would sometimes wear the same shirt for a few days running, is also dubbed a "weirdo" and routinely mocked, but less so when he’s hitting well, a point Bouton returns to, time and again: Ball Four exposes baseball as a system based on front-running. Players who get hits, or who strike batters out, get away with quirks that their less successful teammates get mocked or bawled out for constantly. Today, we call these bursts of successful hitting and pitching insignificantly large sample sizes, and we tend to look at the big picture more, but in the primitive days of 1969, players were only as good as their last game or two. Bouton was an early big-picture type of guy, and he rightly criticizes front-running and front-runners.
He anticipates some of the sabermetric verities we all take for granted now, like the foolishness of equating pitcher’s wins with their effectiveness, attributing it not only to those who run baseball but also to those who write about it:
It’s like what happened to Diego Segui. About a week ago, Segui won two games. He pitched about two innings and gave up two runs and then about four innings and gave up two more runs. He was pitching lousy but he was in there when our team was scoring runs so he got credit for two wins. And so the reporters started coming around. "Gee, Diego, you’re starting to win ballgames. Tell us what you’re doing different."
He wasn’t doing anything different, except maybe pitching worse.
This sort of passage was received poorly in 1969—I’m sure people read that, and thought of Bouton as petty, and jealous of Segui’s success, and a poor teammate, but again today, this passage would be unremarkable, except as an accurate commentary on some reporters’ interest in superficial and meaningless stats.
Ball Four’s most prescient line anticipates the use of steroids, and ballplayers’ attitudes towards that use. He speculates that if you offered any major leaguer some imaginary pill that would help him physically to compete in the short term but which would seriously impair his health for the remainder of his life, or even cut that life short, his only question would be "How many can you give me today?"
When this was just a figment of his imagination, Bouton was thought to be exaggerating the athletes’ mindset, but now we know that he was accurately summarizing the competitive drive of every major leaguer in the game. (Maybe there were, and are, some players who would hold off for moral or ethical or legal reasons, but these players would be in the minority, and more to Bouton’s point, they would soon find themselves at a competitive disadvantage on the playing field.) Viewed in retrospect, Bouton’s perceptions seem not only mild and reasonable ones, but also wise and thought-out with unusual care. It bears re-reading, perhaps even on a more accelerated pace than my own perusal every decade or so.