Word: boutons
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...stands, and, if they have the time, are also lay preachers for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. It's a wonderful world, baseball, full of unspoiled heroes and magnanimous owners and a pantheon of Gods whose names are Ruth and DiMaggio, Cobb and Williams, Musial and Wagner. Jim Bouton, like most American boys, believed so much in the dream that he wanted to be a "big leaguer." Ball Four is the story of his experience with one American myth...
...Bouton, at age 22, was the finest young pitcher in baseball, a star on the '63 world champion New York Yankees. He wore his blonde hair short, and T.V. advertising executives begged for his services to plug their latest masculinity-producing hair tonics. Then two things happened to Jim Bouton: he lost his fastball, and the owners and other players discovered that he was a flake...
...flake in baseball is to be intelligent. A flake is someone who disturbs the status quo (i.c. an outside agitator). Suddenly the television producers were nowhere in sight, the owners treated Bouton not as a star but as a commodity, and he ended up in the minor leagues. Another forgotten man, another tax loss for the owners. But there were new stars, after all, to take his place in the firmament. Jim Bouton became a marginal ball-player, lingering in the lower minor leagues until baseball expanded in 1968 and his contract was picked up by the Seattle Pilots...
BALL FOUR is the story of Bouton's try for a comeback. But because Jim Bouton is a flake it is also much more. It is an account of chicanery on the part of the owners of stupidity on the part of the managerial staff, and of blindness among rank and file ball-players. Ball Four places the all-American game under the scrutinizing of an experienced eve and finds it a game played by men, not giants, Ball Four is also the best book ever written about baseball...
...Ball Four, Bouton...