This book had me laughing out loud several times. Even though it was written about 30 years ago, the baseball experiences still ring true. Bouton has a great sense of humor, and the anecdotes about both stars and players you never heard of are a treat. I used this book to get me through the last off-season, and it was a lot of fun to read.

The seminal book on the humanistic side of baseball, "Ball Four" exposes truths previously unseen.

Jim Bouton wrote of his 1969 season he spent with the Seattle Pilots and the Astros, all the while throwing in the essential details from his days as a Yankee. He was a struggling pitcher who was trying to use his knuckler to come back; but in reality, he was an aspiring writer waiting to tell the insider stories of his teammates.

His book was thought of as a Judas, a traitor initially. In fact, there was quite a bit of hatred and anger over the revealing of Mickey Mantle's alcohol problem. Adultery, playing with hangovers, drugs, and heated altercations are seemingly every day experiences of a professional baseball player.

I'll never forget one of the classic lines of the book, a line that showed true insight:
MY NAME IS TED F*$#ING WILLIAMS AND I'M THE GREATEST HITTER IN BASEBALL!"

In light of the recent whistle-blowing of Jose Canseco, I'm struck by how difficult writing this book must have been for Bouton. In a culture and society that has changed drastically since the sixties and seventies, the risk he took is almost unfathomable to anyone today. Publishing the book guaranteed alienation and black-balling from those in baseball with power.

It's a must-have for any sports fan who loves to read. It's a classic that captured an era of baseball - the days before agents, greedy players, steroids, ridiculous commercialization, and a watered down league - for which many reminisce.

Ball Four is a good and important book to own. If one mark of a good book is its ability to provoke reactions, and often contradictory reactions, then Ball Four is a fine book.

What really makes the book a worthwhile read is the way that it reflects a time of momentous change in baseball. I'm not sure if younger fans can truly appreciate how rapidly things were changing in baseball back then. America experienced a broader social revolution throughout 1967 and 1968, but it really took until 1969 for it to work fully its way into baseball. If you look at the baseball cards from 1967 and 1968, they're bland grey items whereupon the players all look like crew-cutted astronauts. Come 1970, 1971, and beyond, everything is different: sideburns, Afros, wild psychadelic colors. Ball Four came out at the leading edge of these changes, and it captured festering tensions between baseball's old guard and a skeptical generation of young players.

Ball Four is widely hailed as a great classic. It's not quite as pathbreaking as its reputation, however. For one thing, it had a predecessor earlier in the decade, The Long Season, by Jim Brosnan, another "kiss and tell" book written by an active player. Brosnan's previous book is better written and more insightful. Ball Four created more of a sensation, but mostly because it was slummier -- it revels a bit more in the drinking and carousing than does the previous book. Because of this, Ball Four upset the baseball establishment a bit more, and it titillated young readers a bit more. Other aspects of the book were equally shocking (back then, anyway): for example, the portrayal of many authority figures -- coaches, managers, and baseball executives -- as dunderheads. This was an anti-establishment book in many respects.

Baseball was changing on all fronts, and these changes are well reflected in this book. Bouton pitches for the Seattle Pilots, in their first and last year of their existence, and the first season of the newly created league divisions. You also read of the attempts of baseball players to create a union, and the divisions among players this caused. You've also got the new turf parks, such as the Houston Astrodome where Bouton finishes up his season. And there are all of the social changes: the sexual revolution, the hashing out of racial issues, and perhaps first and foremost, the generation gap.

Bouton captures all this and more. Having said all that, my enjoyment of this book is limited by the fact that Bouton's own perspective is often arrogant and intolerant, in much the same way that he derides the older coaches and managers as being. You get the clear sense while reading him that the 1960s generational wars were caused not only by an older generation stuck in its ways, but equally by a younger generation that assumed it was automatically right and that they had nothing to learn from anybody. For example, Bouton persistently quotes his managers and coaches only to show how stupid they are. Now, there is such a thing as stupidity among the old, but all rebellious kids usually think that the older generation has missed a beat. Sometimes they're right, and sometimes not. Bouton's always convinced he's right, but there's little reason to believe he always is.

A typical battle between Bouton and his pitching coach Sal Maglie concerns Bouton's attempt to survive on the knuckleball. Sal Maglie gets on his case about it, and discourages him from throwing the knuckler exclusively. Bouton is convinced that his other stuff is basically gone, and the only way he's going to hang on is if he relies on the knuckler, and he wants to be left alone to concentrate on that pitch.

Let's just examine this from both sides for a moment to get a sense of whether Bouton's contempt for Maglie is justified.

When Bouton came up, he was a very successful pitcher with the New York Yankees. But alt

In 1970, baseball was hit with two ground-breaking events that shook it from its complacent stance left over from the days of FDR. First, Curt Flood began his challenge to the time-honored reserve clause when he tried to block his trade to Philadelphia. And second, the publication of a relief pitcher's season diary with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros, a book that challenged the image of ballplayers forever.

That book was "Ball Four", and it was the view of a memorable 1969 season for Jim Bouton, the author and a former star pitcher with the Yankees. Now down on his luck and struggling to remain on a major-league roster, Bouton decided to document his trek from the dungeons of the minor leagues to the full-fledged ecstasy of pitching a major league game successfully.

It's the stories along the way, however, that made baseball squirm...

Seen through the light of post-Watergate "destroying the heroes" (and through the troubling trend of post-9/11 to build them back up), "Ball Four" seems on some levels like "been there, done that". But seen through the context of the time it came out, it shook the foundations of the game and caused a major scandel for Bouton and kept him from being invited to Old Timers' Day in New York.

Bouton was a former phenom whose fastball secured him a spot on the Yankees roster in the early Sixties, but by the time of the 1969 season he was struggling to find a new pitch to accomadate the sore arm that he acquired in place of that fastball. Here documented is his struggle with mastering the knuckleball, easily the most difficult pitch to control. Also, Bouton has money problems that his bosses aren't eager to resolve. Before Curt Flood's post-season trade disputes began, Bouton is seen fighting tooth-and-nail for a measly $1000 at a time, and his trade from Seattle could very well have had something to do with that (or his insistance on investing in a new product on the market, something called "Gatorade" which was supposedly better than soda for ballplayers).

Bouton also discusses the times he's living in, and how baseball chooses to ignore them. Race relations, the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and all the issues that defined the Sixties never seemed to touch baseball, but Bouton gets under the skin of his teammates and his coachs by embracing some of the youth culture around him. Some of the funniest passages describe his reactions to the constant stream of country-and-western music at the back of the team bus, where he tries to "fit in" with the guys.

Bouton is remarkably honest for a ballplayer, spicing his diary with revealing passages about himself, his past, and the pasts of those around him. That's what brought him before the auspices of comissioner Bowie Kuhn to "deny" what he wrote as being true. His discussions about Mickey Mantle (whose alcoholism eventually killed him) was seen as a Benedict Arnold-esque turn in 1970, but now we all know Bouton was telling the truth.

Bouton's struggles with control both on the field and against his bosses make "Ball Four" a revelation, as it shows old-time baseball as the antiquated institution it is. He also revels in the fact that he's not a typical jock, and many of the teammates around him who may have been angered by tales about their own faults actually emerge as more sympathetic figures than they would have in the typical hagiograpchic sports screeds. Here they're real human beings, not the God-like figures of yore.

Jim Bouton went from being a good pitcher with arm problems to a truth-telling Judas who wrote himself out of the game. But when the book you pen is "Ball Four", it might very well be worth it. Bouton will be remembered for his masterpiece of sports literature far longer than the critics who took him to task for that. You couldn't ask for a better won-loss record.

Even without personally meeting Jim Bouton I can say for certain that he his my friend. We share the same cranky attitudes, the same disrespect for authority ( I sometimes wear my "Question Authority" t-shirt to work) and his insistency on telling the truth. No matter what. I work as a Registered Nurse at a long term mental health care facility and could probably go mano-a-mano with Jim about the utter incompetence of "the general manger" or "the manager." Jim is a man of great courage and has the luxury of having a hottie wife who is also as smart and as skillful as a later day Anne Bancroft. Buy this book or forever live in purgatory. Ken