Ball Four RosettaBooks Sports Classics eBook Jim Bouton
Download As PDF : Ball Four RosettaBooks Sports Classics eBook Jim Bouton 
Ball Four The Final Pitch is the original book plus all the updates, unlike the 20th Anniversary Edition paperback.
When Ball Four was published in 1970, it created a firestorm. Bouton was called a Judas, a Benedict Arnold and a “social leper” for having violated the “sanctity of the clubhouse.” Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force Bouton to sign a statement saying the book wasn’t true. Ballplayers, most of whom hadn’t read it, denounced the book. It was even banned by a few libraries.
Almost everyone else, however, loved Ball Four. Fans liked discovering that athletes were real people--often wildly funny people. Many readers said it gave them strength to get through a difficult period in their lives. Serious critics called it an important document.
David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting on Vietnam, wrote a piece in Harper’s that said of Bouton “He has written… a book deep in the American vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book.”
In 1999 Ball Four was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the “Books of the Century.” And Time magazine chose it as one of the “100 Greatest Non-Fiction” books.
Besides changing the image of athletes, the book played a role in the economic revolution in pro sports. In 1975, Ball Four was accepted as legal evidence against the owners at the arbitration hearing, which lead to free agency in baseball and, by extension, to other sports.
Today Ball Four has taken on another role--as a time capsule of life in the sixties. “It is not just a diary of Bouton's 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros,” says sportswriter Jim Caple. “It's a vibrant, funny, telling history of an era that seems even further away than four decades. To call it simply a “tell all book” is like describing The Grapes of Wrath as a book about harvesting peaches in California.”
This ebook version of Ball Four includes the first edition, the 1980, 1990 and 2000 updates, and 138 photos.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jim Bouton was born in Newark, NJ, in 1939. He grew up in Rochelle Park, a blue-collar town that was too small for Little League. The result was that kids learned to play baseball without uniforms, parents, coaches, or umpires.
In high school, his nickname was “warm up Bouton” because he never got into the games. Advised that becoming a major league pitcher was “unrealistic,” Bouton wrote his Careers Week report on the life of a forest ranger. He got a C on his report and an A on the cover--a nice drawing of a squirrel in a tree.
Bouton was an All-Star pitcher and won 20 games for the Yankees in 1963. The next year he won 18 games and beat the Cardinals twice in the World Series. Eventually a sore arm got him sold to the Seattle Pilots--for a bag of batting practice balls. That’s when he began taking notes for his diary Ball Four, published in 1970.
In the 1970s he was a top-rated TV sportscaster in New York City, acted in a Robert Altman film called The Long Goodbye, and made a brief comeback with the Atlanta Braves.
In 2003 Bouton wrote and self-published Foul Ball, a diary of his battle to save a historic ballpark in Pittsfied, MA. Bouton says he only writes when he’s bursting to say something. “Ball Four was a book I wanted to write,” he says. “Foul Ball was a book I had to write.
Today Bouton lives in a forest in western Massachusetts.
Ball Four RosettaBooks Sports Classics eBook Jim Bouton
I discovered a copy of "Ball Four" in my high school library over 25 years ago, and found it to be laugh-out-loud funny. Jim Bouton, in the twilight of his baseball career, and suffering from a sore arm (this was in the days before sports medicine came along and prolonged careers), reinvented himself as a knuckleball pitcher and hooked on with the lowly expansion Seattle Mariners. His observations on locker room life and on the easy availability of hot young women to professional athletes, was an inspiration to me at age 14. Ever since then, I've picked up a copy of the book every few years (and I have at least three copies by now) and always find something new to enjoy or quote or admire.Other reviewers on this site refer to "Ball Four" as "dated". I could not disagree more. Even though the book was largely written in 1969, it still has a lot to tell us about modern-day society, labor-management relationships, the role of sports in society, and politics. Bouton, as a 30-year-old ballplayer, was unusually observant, and, as he writes from 1969 -- the same year that "Mad Men" is up on TV now, as I write this review -- spokevery perceptively about the kinds of societal change that most of us enjoy watching Don Draper struggle with. Also, as an avowed left-winger, Bouton provides a perspective different to the majority of other baseball figures.
Reading "Ball Four", you can choose to just enjoy the more raunchy or R-rated material while ignoring the more social or political material. Or you can read up on the very early years of baseball's labor wars, and get your history lesson on the likes of Bowie Kuhn and Marvin Miller. Or, if you enjoyed the movie "Office Space", there's tons of material here about the short-sightedness of the management, which involved at least 7 increasingly muffled layers of supervision between the owners and the players of a single team. Bouton was a keen student of baseball history, and spends a fair bit of time talking about old players, and the guys he followed when he was a kid; he has the misfortune in 1969 to be coached by Sal Maglie, one of Bouton's childhood heroes but a truly inept pitching coach (as they say, never meet your heroes!)). But, not only that, Bouton figured into the very dawn of today's statistical-oriented baseball analytics --he realized that relief pitchers should be judged by inherited runners scored and baserunners-per-inning ratios, rather than purely by wins and losses. He was immensely valuable as a relief pitcher in 1969 -- his Strat-O-Matic card proves that -- but the Pilots ignored him and under-utilized him, because they weren't paying attention to the right information.
So, read "Ball Four" -- and its several updates, issued in 1980, 1990, and 2000. There's something amazing on nearly every page of the book and its supplements -- funny, titillating, insightful, of historical interest, or just plain mind-boggling. There are very few other baseball books that hit their targets so directly, or that are so eminently quotable. The book will be 50 years old soon, but it will never, ever, go out of date.
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Ball Four RosettaBooks Sports Classics eBook Jim Bouton Reviews
I read this book in my high school years in the 70s and again now. I think my rating would be 4/5 stars both times. I enjoyed the humor, baseball stories, and the updates provided in today's version. As a baseball fan, I enjoyed an "insider's view" to coaching, player behavior and attitudes, what happens in non-game time with a team, and relationships between players. It was interesting to see how baseball has changed in some ways (the author "fought" hard for $1000 raise and many players earned less than $20,000) and stayed the same in many ways. In trying to describe why I didn't rate this book a 5, I think I didn't care for the fact he wrote without letting the people he was writing about know. His attitude seemed a little cynical at times in his view of management and players he didn't care for. I think if I were his teammate, I wouldn't have liked to discover his publishing a book about "what happens in the locker room stays in the locker room" type of things either as some baseball people then took offense to. Ball Four was controversial when it was released but seems "tame" now after reading Jose Canseco's revelations and others. All in all, a good read for a baseball person.
I first read this book back in the mid 70's when I wanted to learn a little bit about baseball because I wanted to be able to talk with co-workers about the game. I was not a baseball or sports fan at the time. To tell the truth, I'm still not. But I just got a retirement job as an usher at a minor league ballpark and decided that I needed to refresh some info. So, when this book popped up as a special daily deal, I got it again. It was even better after almost 40 years. What I loved about the book was that it made baseball players human beings and that made me curious about the game. Reading it again made me appreciate what the players went through back then, the difficulty of their lives (in spite of all of the so-called glamour) and how tenuous the baseball career can be. This edition also included updates from many years after it was published and it thrilled me and yes, I cried along with him. It is one of the best books that I have ever read.
I discovered a copy of "Ball Four" in my high school library over 25 years ago, and found it to be laugh-out-loud funny. Jim Bouton, in the twilight of his baseball career, and suffering from a sore arm (this was in the days before sports medicine came along and prolonged careers), reinvented himself as a knuckleball pitcher and hooked on with the lowly expansion Seattle Mariners. His observations on locker room life and on the easy availability of hot young women to professional athletes, was an inspiration to me at age 14. Ever since then, I've picked up a copy of the book every few years (and I have at least three copies by now) and always find something new to enjoy or quote or admire.
Other reviewers on this site refer to "Ball Four" as "dated". I could not disagree more. Even though the book was largely written in 1969, it still has a lot to tell us about modern-day society, labor-management relationships, the role of sports in society, and politics. Bouton, as a 30-year-old ballplayer, was unusually observant, and, as he writes from 1969 -- the same year that "Mad Men" is up on TV now, as I write this review -- spokevery perceptively about the kinds of societal change that most of us enjoy watching Don Draper struggle with. Also, as an avowed left-winger, Bouton provides a perspective different to the majority of other baseball figures.
Reading "Ball Four", you can choose to just enjoy the more raunchy or R-rated material while ignoring the more social or political material. Or you can read up on the very early years of baseball's labor wars, and get your history lesson on the likes of Bowie Kuhn and Marvin Miller. Or, if you enjoyed the movie "Office Space", there's tons of material here about the short-sightedness of the management, which involved at least 7 increasingly muffled layers of supervision between the owners and the players of a single team. Bouton was a keen student of baseball history, and spends a fair bit of time talking about old players, and the guys he followed when he was a kid; he has the misfortune in 1969 to be coached by Sal Maglie, one of Bouton's childhood heroes but a truly inept pitching coach (as they say, never meet your heroes!)). But, not only that, Bouton figured into the very dawn of today's statistical-oriented baseball analytics --he realized that relief pitchers should be judged by inherited runners scored and baserunners-per-inning ratios, rather than purely by wins and losses. He was immensely valuable as a relief pitcher in 1969 -- his Strat-O-Matic card proves that -- but the Pilots ignored him and under-utilized him, because they weren't paying attention to the right information.
So, read "Ball Four" -- and its several updates, issued in 1980, 1990, and 2000. There's something amazing on nearly every page of the book and its supplements -- funny, titillating, insightful, of historical interest, or just plain mind-boggling. There are very few other baseball books that hit their targets so directly, or that are so eminently quotable. The book will be 50 years old soon, but it will never, ever, go out of date.
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