RIP, Jim Bouton

I return to the blog ahead of schedule to acknowledge the profound debt my baseball fandom owes to Jim Bouton and Ball Four.

Bouton died Wednesday, age 80. Ball Four, his diary book of the 1969 season, lives on.

Bouton was a significant pitcher at the end of the 1950-60s Yankee dynasty, a max-effort power pitcher who won 18 games in in 1963 and 21 in 1964. The Yankees lost both World Series; Bouton himself lost his only Series start in '63 but won twice in '64 against the Cardinals.

But in 1965 his fortunes, and those of the Yankees, collapsed. He sustained an arm injury that essentially robbed him of his fastball. By 1969 he was hanging on a knuckleballer -- and was part of the collection of has-beens and never-weres assembled to be the expansion Seattle Pilots.

"Ball Four" was published the next year. Crafted by New York newspaper man Leonard Shecter out of Bouton's notes and tape-recorded musings, the book was a sensation -- a then-unheard of glimpse of ballplayers as flawed men crawling around on hotel roofs trying to peek into windows. Bouton's commentary on former teammate Mickey Mantle outraged almost everybody in baseball at the time, but it holds up pretty well a half-century after Mantle's 1969 retirement.

Indeed, the book itself holds up well. When I first read it in 1970, almost every name in the book was relevant to a fan. Forty-nine years later, many of the names and issues are obscure -- but many are not. Bouton and Shecter wrote in a time of turmoil in and out of the game, and Ball Four is an outstanding foundation for understanding where the game was then.

Bouton includes a great deal of commentary on the rise of the players union and its then-relatively new executive director, Marvin Miller -- this virtually on the eve of the Curt Flood case and five years before the arbitration ruling that created free agency. The use of amphetamines  -- "greenies" -- is described as routine.

And all this is in the context of a fallen star trying to regain his stature with a new pitch, an athlete with concerns outside the arena, a teammate at once uncomfortable with and participating in the unruly behavior, a parent and husband gone too much from his family. Bowie Kuhn, then the commissioner of baseball, thought this depiction of reality damaged the sport by disillusioning its fans.

For this bookish boy, it did the opposite. I can't imagine my baseball fandom without Ball Four as a foundation piece. It came at the right time for me.

Notes, quotes and comment

Slow times in baseball news, so I'll just toss a few recent links your direction and get on with other things in my life:

* Jim Bouton's book Ball Four played a significant role in my becoming a baseball fan almost a half-century ago. The material Bouton and Leonard Shecter used to create that marvelous book -- notes, tape recordings, manuscripts, correspondence -- is being auctioned. Bidding closes Jan. 21.

* The chatter about a Brian Dozier trade to the Dodgers has largely quieted, but I wouldn't call it dead yet. Baseball America's organizations prospect rankings has reached the NL West teams (last division this year), and here's Los Angeles's Top 10 list. I expect that if the Twins do trade Dozier to the Dodgers, three of those names will be involved. The Dodgers are, supposedly, unwilling to include more than one.

* The St. Louis Post-Dispatch tells the story of Seth Maness, relief pitcher and surgical pioneer -- first major leaguer to undergo a surgical alternative to Tommy John surgery. Not every pitcher whose elbow goes south can have this procedure, but the recovery time for those who can figures to be sharply better.

Ball Four

Jim Bouton's basic Strat card
with the Seattle Pilots, 1969.

I promise, I'm not going to go into detail here about my Strat-O-Matic project. Nothing is more boring than somebody else's fantasy team, except perhaps somebody else's solitaire fantasy league. (If' you are for some reason interested in the project, click here.)

But I did want to comment briefly on why the 1969 season appeals so strongly to me. That was the summer I discovered baseball. The Twins were good (there's a argument to be made that, even though they didn't get to the World Series, the 1969 Twins were the best team in their Minnesota tenure).

And it was the season that provided the grist for Ball Four, a truly marvelous book. A sensation and a scandal when it came out in 1970, it was an insider's version of professional baseball by a player with an outsider's viewpoint. Jim Bouton had been a star pitcher on the Yankees in the final years of their dynasty; he was, as he compiled the diary book, a marginal pitcher trying to hang on.

The powers that be didn't appreciate the book. Its publication probably helped shorten Bouton's career, although a 5.40 ERA didn't help much either. But it played no small role in making the young me a baseball fan.

What a book. There's stuff on the Mantle-Ford-Maris Yankees of the early-mid 1960s, there's the one sub-glorious year of the Seattle Pilots, and there's the constant ferment of the culture. Race, Vietnam, changing sexual mores, the rise of the players union -- Ball Four isn't just baseball, it's baseball in the context of America in a specific time.

If you haven't read it, you should. And if you have read it, it's worth the re-read.

Weekend reading list

Here are:

Ozzie Guillen on the Twins, Danny Valencia and his pitching advisor ("let me talk to my vodka."

A New York Times piece on how and why the Twins consistently walk fewer batters than anybody else.

Joe Posnanski on Kenny Williams, Ozzie's boss and lover of creative conflict.

Jay Jaffee on the 40th anniversary of Ball Four. That book just may be one of the biggest reasons i became as big a baseball fan as I am. If you haven't read it, read it.