They were crammed with anything and everything Bouton saw, heard, thought, or felt. The 978 sheets became the bones of what would become Ball Four. In all he accumulated 978 separate sheets of notes-on hotel stationery, envelopes, toilet paper, whatever he could find. While his teammates laughed and talked and traded tales of personal and baseball woe, Bouton took it all down, writing this or that on whatever he had available so that he’d remember it that night when he would record the day’s events into his tape recorder.
And then some.īouton’s eye didn’t miss much. The players, who were by nature conservative, were at last growing their hair out-just a little-and starting to push back against the paternalistic rules dictated by management. Bouton and Shecter realized they were catching the game at a crossroads and were alert to the confluence.īaseball and the 1960s were colliding, they noticed. He analyzed everything-his thoughts, assumptions, values, as well as those of his teammates and management. What made Ball Four a Nehru? Prodded by his editor, former New York Post columnist Len Shecter, Bouton dug deeper into the psyche of baseball than anyone had previously attempted. That’s like saying, ‘Hey, roomie, I’m going to wear a new suit tomorrow,’ and he shows up in a Nehru. “I knew he was writing a book from day one because he told me,” Miller continued, “but there had never been anything like that. In an era of social change, when seemingly everybody was questioning everything, Ball Four brought at last the ethos of the times into the staid world of baseball. “You were either for it or against it,” Bouton’s roommate with the 1969 Houston Astros Norm Miller told me. There had been sports diaries before, which, structurally-speaking, was what Ball Four was, but there had never been a sports diary like this one-one that was also a de facto political statement. His kindling was Ball Four, a book that torched everything the game’s standard bearers held sacred. Fifty years ago this month Jim Bouton set the baseball world on fire.
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