Includes a new foreword by Jim Bouton's wife, Paula Kurman To call it simply a ‘tell all book’ is like describing The Grapes of Wrath as a book about harvesting peaches in California.” “It’s a vibrant, funny, telling history of an era that seems even further away than four decades. “It is not just a diary of Bouton’s 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros,” says sportswriter Jim Caple. Today Ball Four has taken on another role-as a time capsule of life in the sixties. a book deep in the American vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book.” David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting on Vietnam, wrote a piece in Harper’s that said of Bouton: “He has written . . . Fans liked discovering that athletes were real people-often wildly funny people. It was even banned by a few libraries.Īlmost everyone else, however, loved Ball Four. Ballplayers, most of whom hadn’t read it, denounced the book.
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. When Ball Four was published in 1970, it created a firestorm. The 50th Anniversary edition of “the book that changed baseball” (NPR), chosen by Time magazine as one of the “100 Greatest Non-Fiction” books.
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