Ball Four - Jim Bouton

Ball Four

By Jim Bouton

  • Release Date: 2012-03-20
  • Genre: Baseball
Score: 4
4
From 108 Ratings

Description

The 50th Anniversary edition of “the book that changed baseball” (NPR), chosen by Time magazine as one of the “100 Greatest Non-Fiction” books.
 
When Ball Four was published in 1970, it created a firestorm. Bouton was called a Judas, a Benedict Arnold, and a “social leper” for having violated the “sanctity of the clubhouse.” Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force Bouton to sign a statement saying the book wasn’t true. Ballplayers, most of whom hadn’t read it, denounced the book. It was even banned by a few libraries.
 
Almost everyone else, however, loved Ball Four. Fans liked discovering that athletes were real people—often wildly funny people. David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting on Vietnam, wrote a piece in Harper’s that said of Bouton: “He has written . . . a book deep in the American vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book.”
 
Today Ball Four has taken on another role—as a time capsule of life in the sixties. “It is not just a diary of Bouton’s 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros,” says sportswriter Jim Caple. “It’s a vibrant, funny, telling history of an era that seems even further away than four decades. To call it simply a ‘tell all book’ is like describing The Grapes of Wrath as a book about harvesting peaches in California.”
  Includes a new foreword by Jim Bouton's wife, Paula Kurman  
“An irreverent, best-selling book that angered baseball’s hierarchy and changed the way journalists and fans viewed the sports world.” —The Washington Post

Reviews

  • Ball Four

    5
    By Former Islander 2
    If you loved baseball as a teen during the sixties and collected baseball cards, you will fall in love again reading this. The personnel names bring the feelings of the time back to you again.
  • An American classic!

    5
    By Eric N. S.
    A classic - you can see baseball’s warts but it makes the ga e more human and one to love all the more!
  • Very poor

    1
    By NSrythme
    Very disappointed with a juvenile reflection of a shallow baseball player.

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