Word: boutons
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Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn was hopping mad. "This is a horrible piece of writing!" he fumed at Houston Astro Pitcher Jim Bouton, author of a new book called Ball Four. According to sources close to the commissioner's office, Kuhn went on: "You've done the game a grave disservice. Saying players kissed on the Seattle team bus-incredible! Or that some of our greatest stars were drunk on the field. What can you be thinking...
Well, ahem, says Bouton, he was thinking of "social commentary, an honest book that tells what baseball is really like." Kuhn, apparently, is not big on social commentary, and last week he ordered Bouton not to write another word about baseball as long as he remained an active player. In light of Bouton's pitching performances this season -two wins, three losses, an ERA of 7.02-the warning may not stay in effect for very long. In any case, Ball Four (World Publishing Co.; $6.95), a diary of the author's ups and downs with the New York...
Other players have written "inside" books on baseball, yet none has created more of a furor than Bouton's "muck-stirrer," as one sportswriter calls it. The reason seems to be that players do not mind being knocked for their playing; it's talking about their playing around off the field that they object...
...Bouton tells, for instance, of "beaver shooting," which in his words "can be anything from peering over the top of the dugout to look up dresses to hanging from the fire escape on the 20th floor of some hotel to look into a window. I've seen guys chin themselves on transoms, drill holes in doors, even shove mirrors under a door." When Bouton was with the Yankees, he recalls how Mickey Mantle used to lead hunting parties to the roof of the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, B.C. "One of the first big thrills I had with the Yankees...
...Ball. To anyone who ever lived in a college dorm or an Army barracks, Bouton's tales are not all that scandalous. Bowie Kuhn and the players aside, fans will find Ball Four a fast, flip and often funny account of the author's struggle to stay in the big leagues as a knuckleballing pitcher after losing his high hard one (Bouton won 21 games for the Yankees of 1963). To be sure, he gets his digs in along the way. He tells of Mantle showing up for a game "hung over out of his mind" and pushing...