What did "Ball Four" do?

Bouton's tell-all book changed the sports world

It was Christmas Eve, 1970 and I can hear my mother banging on the ceiling below my room in the attic.

“Go to sleep!”

She was offering that suggestion because of the book I was reading at the time, the one early Xmas present we were allowed in our house. I had really, really, really wanted the new Jim Bouton book, “Ball Four” and sure enough, Santa came through.

So I retired to my room upstairs, stretched out on my bed and whipped through the nearly 400 pages of Bouton’s classic, laughing loudly and often enough that my mother felt the urge to offer a directive that I, of course, as a respectful teenager, ignored. I read the whole book that night.

I don’t know that I ever wanted to read a book so badly. A baseball player myself, still unrealistically dreaming of big things, what was life in the major - bleeping - leagues, as Ted Williams used to call them, really like? What was it like playing against the guys I’d watched on TV or seen at Fenway Park? And the humor, the kinds of things you would hear around the ballpark, in the dugout, in the locker room, Bouton captured it all, as if you were there, listening in.

And the stories, Mickey Mantle “beaver shooting” or dealing with the always annoying coaches — just like when, in a few years, you’d have to deal with some idiot boss who didn’t get it. It was funny how, in a strange way, “Ball Four” prepared you for real life, not just baseball.

I remember reading about Bouton finding out, by being able to do it himself, that he, too, had “pinpoint control.” That what he’d read and heard about these magical baseball players being able to “put the ball where they wanted” well, they weren’t all that much better at it than he was so what was the big damn deal? They were people, after all.

If I couldn’t make it as a player, all these guys I’d read in the Boston Globe made a career writing about watching games, why couldn’t I? And it happened!

When I moved to Port Huron, Michigan to take the Sports Editor job at the Port Huron Times Herald, I didn’t know that one of the liveliest voices in “Ball Four” belonged to a native Port Huronian — Jim Gosger.

He was the one who was hiding in the closet, watching his roommate (I later found out it was Tony Conigliaro) in action, his partner moaning “I’ve never done it that way before” and Gosger sticking his head out of the closet, uttering “Yeah, surrrre,” — a most memorable catch phrase that hung around the team the rest of the season.

Then I met the guy, got to be friends with him and took him to his first major-league game since he’d been released by the Mets years earlier, saw how walking into Tiger Stadium, greeting some old teammates (Tom Seaver) completely brought him back into that world, how much it all meant, still. I wrote about that and more in my latest baseball book, “Diamond Duels.” Gosger’s the final chapter, reminiscing about his career. It was fun.

I even got to chat with Bouton over the phone. He was, then in Maine, visiting a college campus and we talked about the book, how it changed his life and mine, really. It was funny and touching and honest and revealing and it seemed like such a magical, wonderful, exciting life and here he was, having had a huge literary success, hanging out with a bunch of college jocks, getting high, enjoying the perks, the favored life of someone special, a professional athlete AND a successful author, Jesus! But was it enough?

I wasn’t good enough as a player to make it but maybe as a writer, I loved sports, I knew enough about sports I thought, to make it there. And somehow, I did. Not at some big-time, hot shot front-line newspaper like the Boston Globe or the Hartford Courant or the New York Times, but middle-of-the-road papers where I’d get to cover some big-time teams and games, get a glimpse, a taste of that sort of life.

Reading some of “Ball Four” the other night, it still makes me chuckle. Bouton went on to write an Epilogue, and other books, got involved in TV and Big-League Chew and restoring an old ballpark, even a return trip to the majors. An interesting, if perpetually unsettled, life.

And now, all these years later, you wonder if what “Ball Four” did, flinging open the lives and quirks and triumphs and failings of these chosen few for all of us to see, was a good thing. They aren’t heroes any more, not really. They are entitled young men, ridiculously wealthy most of them, earning more money in a single year than their father and probably his father had ever earned in both their lifetimes, guys who, many of them grew up pitifully poor, now playing mind-numbing endless card games on chartered planes for Rolex watches, guys who are managed or coached by a few old-timers still hanging around, also clinging to that magical life, that golden ride.

I’m grateful that I got a glimpse, a taste of that life. Also enormously proud that my son, despite a mighty low draft number and more obstacles thrown in his way than you or I will ever know, found a way to get there, to make that Everestian climb to the major leagues.

We never really know where life will take us, do we? Jim Gosger might have held a lifelong grudge against the game that spurned him if some joker who remembered his hilarious lines in a book he read when he was a kid hadn’t insisted on bringing him back to the game that enchanted both of us, on very different levels, of course.

When Jim Bouton, on the very fringes of the end of his baseball career, thought it would be a good idea to share the experience of life in the major leagues with the world, he had no idea what he was doing, writing “Ball Four.” Or what it would mean. I’m not sure any of us know, even now.

JIM BOUTON’S OBITUARY IN THE NEW YORK TIMES FROM 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/sports/baseball/jim-bouton-dead-ball-four.html

John Nogowski is the author of two baseball books; Diamond Duels, which came out in March of this year and Last Time Out, which came out in 2022. Both are available locally at Barnes & Noble and Books A Million.