Loathed It: Ball Four

Loathed It:Ball Four William J. Ryczek (bio) Blasphemers are valuable members of society. Nearly every major revolution in the history of the world has been started by someone who challenged widely accepted dogma. I don't claim to be Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, but I do think it's time everyone stopped genuflecting before Jim Bouton and Ball Four. Some people, including Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and veteran columnist Dick Young, didn't like the book from the moment the first excerpts appeared; Young famously referred to Bouton as a "social leper."1 That was to be expected, for Kuhn viewed himself as the guardian of baseball's morals, while Young was a brash young writer who'd become a crotchety old defender of the sporting establishment. But there were others who took great offense at Ball Four, many of whom wore spiked shoes and stirruped hose. If Bouton wasn't a social leper in major league locker rooms before he wrote his book, he certainly became one afterward. I interviewed more than fifty men who played for the Yankees during the 1960s, and while most had fond memories of their former teammates, two were almost universally disliked. One was pitcher Jim Coates, an abrasive hillbilly who threw at batters' heads with intent to maim. The other was Bouton. Some old Yankees had never liked him, and some were angry because of what he wrote about them. Most, however, were upset by what he wrote about their hero, Mickey Mantle. Mantle was idolized by many of his teammates who gloried in his company and even named their sons after him. "Mickey liked me," was a phrase I heard proudly from several players, and being liked by Mickey was one of the highlights of their lives. I don't share their anger in that regard. Bouton destroyed the previous image of Mantle, but that image was a false one, and there's nothing wrong with toppling a false idol. The Mantle Bouton portrayed in Ball Four is consistent with what I learned while researching a book on the Yankees. Mickey was a great teammate, popular in the clubhouse, possessor of a quick wit, and one [End Page 11] of the best baseball players of all time. He was also frequently surly and rude with the public, a world-class womanizer, and a mean drunk. While many Yankees hated Bouton for what he wrote about Mantle, Joe Pepitone was upset because Bouton talked about everyone else's sexual infidelities but didn't mention his own. No one knows more about the sexual activity of a major league baseball player than Joseph Anthony Pepitone, who hit on my biggest problem with Ball Four. It's okay to debunk a false image and replace it with the truth. It's not okay to debunk a false image and replace it with an equally false one. When discussing the credibility of Ball Four, let's start, as Pepitone suggests, with infidelity, a touchy subject in an "honest" memoir. Although Bouton later admitted he was unfaithful to his wife during his playing career,2 he portrayed himself in Ball Four as a faithful husband and regaled his readers with stories of others' infidelities. His friend Mike Marshall, who, according to his former wife, was a serial philanderer, called Bouton's ex–wife Bobbie after she and Bouton divorced. While attempting to seduce her, Marshall told her Bouton had been fooling around all along. To claim to have written an honest book, one that laid bare the most raw, personal weaknesses of others while painting a false picture of himself is disingenuous at best. Bouton might have excused the omission on the grounds that such a revelation would have been hurtful to his wife and damaging to his marriage, but the possibility of hurting others didn't concern him. Ball Four is a very opinionated work. Bouton portrays himself and his close friends, like Marshall and Steve Hovley, as intelligent, clever, and socially conscious. The reader learns that it wasn't easy being Jim Bouton since the unenlightened masses didn't understand him and management didn't appreciate him...