Loved It: Ball Four

Loved It:Ball Four Paul Hensler (bio) The 1968 publication of Jerry Kramer's Instant Reply opened the door to the locker room of one of most storied teams in sports history, and the portrait he painted furnished fans with a view to what became the concluding year of coach Vince Lombardi's tenure at the helm of the Green Bay Packers. This send-off, as it were, was climaxed by the team's victory in Super Bowl II, and the diary Kramer maintained details the grueling regimen of life under Lombardi's rule during the 1967 season. Readers of his book gain a full appreciation of how championships were forged in a small city that took on the quaint appellation of "Titletown" due to the team's dominant success in that decade. In Kramer's telling, that year's edition of the Packers was fueled by a winning tradition that resulted from the team's ineffable laboring under his coach's stern gaze. "Nobody knows the tortures you go through, trying to stay on top as champions," Lombardi told his charges after a practice in late November.1 And the way in which Green Bay asserted themselves over pro football was mirrored to an even greater degree by the achievements of the New York Yankees, notably from 1947 to 1964, when the Bronx Bombers won the American League pennant every year, save for three seasons. Barely two years after Kramer's opus was published, another book was released that could not have been more diametrically opposed to the chronicling of what turned out to be the last phase of the Lombardi–Packer heyday. This new release, Ball Four, authored by former Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton, found its way into the canon of sports literature, where it remains to this day as deeply rooted as most any other book dealing with any athletic endeavor. In the early 1960s, Bouton was among a crop of newcomers to the Yankee roster—Tom Tresh, Joe Pepitone, and Mel Stottlemyre, along with the "Bulldog," [End Page 1] evinced all-star potential—expected to ward off challengers to the club's accustomed place atop the American League. But a not-so-funny thing happened on the way to perpetuating the ostensibly unending dynasty domiciled at Yankee Stadium, and when this new breed and other prospects failed to provide a smooth transition from aging stars such as Mickey Mantle, Elston Howard, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford to fresher talent, while also maintaining the club's accustomed winning tradition, the club's tumble from their pedestal was uglier than most Yankee fans could have imagined. Having a ringside seat to this misfortune, Bouton was hardly an innocent bystander. The promising rookie of 1962 won half of his fourteen decisions and followed this performance with twenty-one victories the next year; he registered eighteen more in 1964 and added a pair in the World Series to seemingly drive a stake in the pitching mound, marking his place in the Yankee rotation. But when he won only nine games over the next four seasons, the evidence was clear: Bouton had damaged his arm beyond repair during that final year of the Yankee dynasty. As the Bombers morphed into the Blunders, falling into the AL basement in 1966, the pitcher hoped in successive Februarys that he would find his old self in spring training and set his fastball ablaze once more. The reality, however, had it that he was near the end of the line—if not, in fact, already there—and having gained "a perspective on the confluence of sports and the world that nobody else who sat where he had sat," Bouton set about to heed a suggestion advanced by his mother shortly before he was first called up to the Yankees—namely to write about his experience as a ballplayer.2 Beginning in late 1968, gathering notes and using a tape deck to record his observations, Bouton forwarded this trove of inchoate information to sportswriter Leonard Shecter, a beat writer who became a pariah in the eyes of Yankee management for his willingness to stick his finger in the eye of the organization, now in decline, by...