“He was my North Star, and I was his”

Posted on May 24, 2023 by Jeff Kallman

“It brought him back in living colour and at the same time highlighted the excrutiating loss,” writes Jim Bouton’s widow, Paula Kurman, Ph.D. ,about writing her coming memoir of their love story. This photo, from Kurman’s collection, shows the couple not long before their 1982 marriage.

The late Jim Bouton’s love for baseball didn’t extend to surrounding himself with memorabilia. His home only featured two photographs from his pitching career because his wife stumbled upon them seeking something else in their basement. One showed a group hug of Bouton and his Hall of Fame Yankee teammates Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle. The other showed a crowd of Yankees shampooing Bouton with champagne.

“Jim spent no time wishing for the old glory days,” writes Bouton’s widow, Paula Kurman, Ph.D., in the Society for American Baseball Research’s Baseball Reasearch Journal, Spring 2023 issue. “But oh, he loved the game itself.”

Not to watch on TV, or to sit in the stands. We almost never went to professional games. He wanted to play, to run in the sunshine, to throw a ball—to take his trusty old glove, suit up, and join a group of guys similarly obsessed. He wanted to work on his motion, get guys out with strategy and a dancing knuckleball. He had no interest in senior leagues, however, or what he called the “beer-belly league” of the Over 40s.

Somehow, some way, Bouton joined local teams of twentysomethings and thirtysomethings, and played. Some, Kurman writes, had seen time in the Show; others still dreamed of it. Her husband was asked often what it was like for a former major league pitcher to play amateur ball. His reply, she records, was, “I wouldn’t know. I don’t think of myself as a former anything.”

All that and quite a bit more comes in an excerpt from Kurman’s forthcoming memoir, The Cool of the Evening: A Love Story, a title she borrowed from Bouton’s favourite pitching coach, Johnny Sain. The book is due in “the first quarter of 2024,” Kurman says, adding that writing it helped her through her grief while the pan-damn-ic gave her all the solitude she’d need to write.

“I loved Jim Bouton and was well and truly loved by him for more than four decades,” she writes. “It doesn’t get any better than that. I was his lover, his wife, his best friend, his playmate, his business partner, his confidante. We were each other’s editors, occasional critics, and most appreciative audiences. He was my North Star, and I was his.”

For everything Bouton wrote in Ball Four—not just the randy boys-will-be-boys hijinks and deeper revelations about the reserve era’s abuses, both of which helped make him a major league pariah—the line for which he may remain best remembered is Ball Four‘s closing: You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out it was the other way around all the time.

When adding a postscript for Ball Four‘s tenth-anniversary republication (Ball Four Plus Ball Five), Bouton finished by saying his life changed when he first picked up a baseball but changed even more after he put it away. We should have known he’d never really put it away. Not until he absolutely had to.

When the couple moved from New Jersey to the Berkshires, Bouton managed to rig a practise area in their unfinished basement: a makeshift mound outline, and a strike zone outlined in black electrical tape. “Jim was working on his pitching skills to be competitive for the historic Saugerties Dutchmen in the Hudson Valley,” Kurman writes, “and for a team called Mama’s Pizza in the Albany Twilight League—named for the time of day the games were played, not the age of the players.”

Bouton remained in sound enough physical shape for such doings. He’d tiptoe downstairs to his makeshift rehearsal space early in the morning and throw from that circle of the mound for twenty minutes. When the ball hit the strike zone outlined on drywall, and the resonance reached the master bedroom upstairs, Kurman could only laugh through the pillow burying her head.

“All that care to leave the room quietly,” she writes, very much in the cheerfully cheeky voice of her husband’s most famous work, “and now Mr. Thunderfootdownthestairs was pounding the hell out of the wall under the bed with his best shots, completely unaware of the sound transmission.”

(Now, I wonder: Remembering his Seattle Pilots roommate Gary Bell’s annual Christmas card salutation, did Mrs. Bouton ever address her husband as “Ass Eyes?”)

This was also a couple who became motivational speakers and semi-professional competitive ballroom dancers together. They administered a recreational baseball league playing under 19th century rules and helped preserve an old ballpark or three. “Would I have been a better wife if I had said to him, get real, you’re not a young man anymore, stop wasting your time?” she asks.

The answer was no, of course. “I loved his focused intensity,” she continues. “No one was more appealing than Jim when he was having a good time. It didn’t matter if he didn’t reach it, whatever the goal was. We both understood that all the benefits were in the journey.” When she watched him go out to the mound yet again, the elder playing for love of the game against those young enough to be his children, “I fell in love with him all over again.”

Once, they traveled to Florence to see Michelangelo’s David. Kurman said to her husband, “to the amusement of some nearby tourists,” Look, Babe, it’s you! By which she meant the pose as much as anything else. “Replace the stone with a ball,” she writes, “and the slingshot with a glove, and there it is. Perfect.”

Until it wasn’t. Kurman remembers the day Bouton discovered he could no longer play even among his amateur compatriots. A week later, he went to his basement to put “some things” away and spotted his glove and a baseball, waiting for him to play. He sat next to her, put his arms around her, and cried. After awhile, Bouton spoke.

“I only feel safe enough to cry when you’re with me,” he said. “I’m always with you, Babe,” she replied.

Kurman and Bouton, still crazy (about each other) after all those years. (SABR, also from Paula Kurman’s collection.)

Bouton contented himself with the stone walls he took to building around their Berkshires property and occasional public appearances, though he and his wife agreed mutually that they’d say nothing of his health issues other than his August 2012 stroke. For as long as they could. In 2017, they couldn’t any longer. They revealed to New York Times writer Tyler Kepner that, a year earlier, Bouton’s decline turned into a diagnosis of cerebral amyloid angiopathy, “a rare form of vascular dementia. It’s progressive and there is no cure.”

The Boutons managed to appear at a 2017 SABR convention and, thanks to the Times article, Old-Timer’s Day at Yankee Stadium in 2018, two decades after the death of Bouton’s daughter, Laurie, helped prompt the burial of any hatchet between Bouton and the Yankees. Though they enjoyed the ceremonies and the tributes, they didn’t stay for the game.

“I feel like I finally belong,” she records Bouton telling her when they arrived home. “I’m part of it, part of them—where I always wanted to be. And you were accepted, too, by the other wives, and by the players. It was different this time. They all wanted to talk to you. The players wanted to know what you thought of things . . . I was so proud to be with you.”

“He was clearly moved and gratified by the acceptance he felt that weekend,” writes Kurman, who was only too well aware that her husband tried as best he could to make light of his former baseball ostracism.

Whatever the motivation of the Yankees in their gracious hospitality and accommodation to our needs, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they were gracious. The deed itself is what counts. That it brought peace to my beloved at the end of his life is something for which I will always be grateful.

She prefaces her excerpt by revealing her husband had three requests of her in the event she out-lived him on earth: 1) Place his archives safely. (They repose in the Library of Congress.) 2) Send his 1962 World Series ring to the Hall of Fame. (That was hard. I’d worn the ring for decades. Jim didn’t wear rings, “in case a game breaks out and I’m called in to pitch.”) 3) Write a book about Bouton “based on notes he urged me to keep during the forty-two years we were together.”

“Nobody knows me the way you do,” he’d say. And, “Write that down,” he’d say when something funny or meaningful or extraordinary happened to us. “Memory fades. Contemporaneous notes are better.”

Suddenly, through the implicit sweetness of the request, I recalled Bouton recording an Astros teammate, pitcher Larry Dierker, approaching him out of the blue (My note-taking is making the natives restless, he’d said elsewhere in Ball Four) to share a thing or two, urging Bouton, “Write this down.”

Bouton met Kurman—a Ph.D. in interpersonal communications and a speech therapist by profession—at a late 1970s fundraiser as his first marriage crumpled. In Ball Four Plus Ball Five, he referred to Kurman invariably as the Magic Lady. The couple married and blended their families (Bouton had three children, Kurman two) in 1982.

His mates on the minor league Portland Mavericks—while he made his pro baseball comeback also in the late 1970s—invariably pointed out assorted elderly women saying, “There’s one for you, Jim.” Finally, Kurman attended a game. “That,” Bouton wrote, “was the day my teammates stopped kidding me about blue-haired old ladies.”

If this excerpt is any indication, you’ll want to read the whole of The Cool of the Evening and believe that maybe Bouton was only half right. Maybe Kurman and Bouton were really a Magic Couple.

One more grip of Jim Bouton

Posted on December 4, 2020 by Jeff Kallman

Wasn’t it true, Don Vito Corleone wondered while commiserating with a fellow Mafia chief in The Godfather (the novel, not the film), that great misfortune often led to unforeseen reward? It proved to be for the late pitcher/writer Jim Bouton, whose sometimes deceptive but nearly-incurable optimism was finally smashed when his youngest child was killed in August 1997.

Driving home in New Jersey, Laurie Bouton stopped short to stay out of an accident in front of her, but a driver behind her didn’t do likewise, smashing into her car. The 31-year-old an uncle described as “Jim all over again” for her free spirit died hours later. It destroyed Bouton’s generally sunny view of life—until it reconciled him to the New York Yankees.

In fact, as biographer Mitchell Nathanson also notes in Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original, Bouton struggled for months to follow until Laurie’s oldest brother, Michael, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times urging the Yankees to do what had never yet been done and invite his father back for an Old Timers Day. (Father once revealed his son’s essay moved him to tears.)

What nobody including Bouton knew was that his decades-long blackballing from the Yankees—for whom he once starred as a pitcher, before his too-hard throwing style ruined his arm and shoulder, reducing him to the margins and back to a knuckleball he abandoned earlier in his career—had absolutely nothing to do with Bouton’s own longtime prime suspect.

Mickey Mantle was hardly thrilled at Bouton’s Ball Four revelations about him, but six years before Laurie’s death the death of one of Mantle’s sons provoked a sympathy letter from Bouton. That prompted Mantle to call his old teammate to say yes, he was ok with Ball Four at last and, no, he wasn’t the reason for Bouton’s Old Timers Day freeze-outs.

The freeze-outs turned out to be courtesy of former Newark Star-Ledger writer Jim Ogle, whom Bouton zinged in Ball Four for treating players “purely on how much they were helping the Yankees to win. Charm, personality, intelligence—nothing counted. Only winning. Ogle didn’t have even the pretense of objectivity . . . in fact, Ogle’s ambition was to work for the Yankees. But they would never give him a job.”

Until they did. The Yankees hired Ogle to direct their club alumni association in 1975, his duties including, as Nathanson writes, “keeping the Yankees in the good graces of their most iconic alumni and organizing Old Timers Days. In his mind both responsibilities could be best discharged by blackballing Jim Bouton.”

Nathanson’s book unfurls Bouton’s story with both affection and the kind of candor Bouton himself would have appreciated. (And in fact insisted upon, when he and his wife agreed to let Nathanson have access to everything from family doings and undoings to the still-preserved Ball Four notes and tapes that ended up sold to the Library of Congress during Bouton’s final illness.)

It’s the story of an intelligent and sensitive young man who didn’t become a pitcher because he looked to turn sacred cows into steak or to write the book that secured his name and sent baseball and about half the world of sports journalism to the rye bottle, either.

Nathanson’s Bouton is a pitcher who had eyes to see, ears to hear, and a conscience to heed, with no malice aforethought but flying in the face of an establishment unwilling to concede the great and glorious game (A. Bartlett Giamatti’s phrase) was only too human. He couldn’t deny the caprices he saw in front of him, whether front office people engaging one-sided, lopsided, deceitful contract talks with players to players themselves proving unheroic often enough while letting the fans in the stands or with their morning after newspapers worship them as gods.

The fun-loving Bouton loved the game but hated its business and duplicities. The longer his pitching career went despite the arm issues, the less Bouton could turn the blind eye. Unlike most players even then, Bouton talked freely when interviewed and didn’t try to hide the sides of him that were unlike the typical jock of his time. Some respected him for it, others rejected him for it.

When his established sportswriting friend Leonard Shecter suggested he keep a kind of running diary on his 1969 season with the expansion Seattle Pilots, Bouton revealed he’d already begun taking notes. Anyone could do it regarding the old imperial Yankees; who else would have thought about doing it among an expansion team of fellow outcasts just trying to keep their jobs and their sanity?

Many Bouton teammates weren’t sympathetic to his final product. The embarrassments of some kept them from seeing that Bouton humanised them and thus elevated them. He was as observant of their field or mound struggles as their off-field shenanigans, sorrows, and oft-ignored or mistreated injuries. He told the world these were human men when it seemed often enough that baseball ignored or denied their humanness.

Bouton had already stepped beyond the bounds of baseball’s proprieties before starting his Ball Four season. He’d supported publicly a threatened American boycott of the 1968 summer Olympics if South Africa’s then whites-only teams were allowed to compete. He spoke against the Vietnam War whenever asked.

Bouton’s original notes, tapes, and the pages shaped by his editor/friend Leonard Shecter for Ball Four now repose in the Library of Congress.

But with Ball Four he was considered either a revelator by those who loved the book or a traitor by those including then-baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn who tried to suppress it. (Or, in the case of the San Diego Padres, leaving a burned copy of it on the Astros’ dugout steps.) It was enough to seed a followup, I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally, about the controversy, his final pitching days before his first retirement, and his early days as a New York sports reporter.

That book wasn’t quite the hit Ball Four was, of course, but it offered a few more insights into what Bouton thought and felt about becoming an unexpected literary star. Not to mention his further thoughts on the real reason the old guard sportswriters resented him: he’d told the stories they thought they should have told but, for assorted and not always edifying reasons, couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Some saw themselves as keepers of the proverbial baseball flame. Others saw themselves as club adjuncts. Jim Brosnan, whose from-the-inside books Nathanson called “tell-some” books, had annoyed them enough. This was too much of enough already.

But Ball Four proved in due course as significant as any other evidence, when it was introduced at the arbitration hearings through which pitcher Andy Messersmith finished what outfielder Curt Flood’s brave but failed prior lawsuit (begun the same year in which Ball Four first appeared) started, ending the reserve era and its suppressions of player pay and rights. Well after its literary stature was affirmed.

The book inspired a rash of further tell-alls from baseball’s insides, from players and collaborators who lacked Bouton’s wit and Shecter’s sensibilities. They hardly understood that Ball Four‘s success lay as much in Bouton’s ability to show baseball’s humanness as in the, shall we say, steamy revelations on which those subsequent books leaned most heavily. (“More outrageous than Ball Four” was a tellingly typical cover blurb.)

Nathanson goes into fine detail Bouton’s years as a sports reporter, his head-buttings with those who thought sports reporting equaled promoting their teams instead of, you know, real reporting. He also goes deeper into the truest conflict inside Bouton’s psyche and life—the guy who achieved beyond his own expectations but couldn’t resist a challenge because he had something to prove past the challenge itself.

His love of baseball the game prompted him toward a comeback bid in the mid-to-late 1970s, including a spell with the minor league legend Portland Mavericks. He eventually made it back with the Atlanta Braves for a September 1978 spell—he once went mano-a-mano with Houston’s ill-fated howitzer J.R. Richard, pitching him to a draw—then walked away feeling for the first time that he didn’t have to prove a thing anymore.

His first baseball retirement led to the crumpling of his first marriage; Bouton and his first wife, Bobbie, had simply grown apart, though Bouton wasn’t immune to the occasional extracurricular activity, with the emphasis on occasional. (They divorced in 1981.) He didn’t really move to do something about it, though, until he met an attractive academic named Paula Kurman unexpectedly at a fundraiser to which both were invited.

Jim Bouton and second wife Paula Kurman, at a Ball Four retrospective.

It was Kurman (a speech therapist with Ph.d in interpersonal communications) who showed Bouton most of all what even his own family couldn’t, that he no longer had to take up quixotic challenges to prove himself to himself. The deception in his optimism until then was that it masked a man who had a difficult if not sometimes impossible time believing in his own worthiness. They married in 1982.

Bouton promoted Big League Chew (his Mavericks teammate Rob Nelson came up with the idea but Bouton sold and promoted it to buyer Wrigley), became a motivational speaker, helped to renovate an old but somewhat storied minor league ballpark, joined his wife learning and becoming a competitive ballroom dancer, continued writing, and eventually also became a stonemason who’d build walls and other supplementing fixtures for their home in the Berkshires.

In other words, this unfairly reputed miserable smasher of icons for its own sake was as normal, life-affirming, and human a man as his critics didn’t or couldn’t see. (Well, not everyone gets dance lessons from stage and film legend Marge Champion.) That 1998 Old Timers Day appearance simply began Bouton’s return from the ranks of the living dead into which his daughter’s senseless death plunged him.

“Looking up in the stands, at all of the family and friends who were there . . . ,” Nathanson writes (they included a contingent of friends bannering themselves “Laurie’s Girls!”), “[Bouton] understood that life could and would go on. It was what he needed to know at the precise moment he needed to know it most.”

The only thing that could and did knock Bouton out permanently enough was the 2012 stroke he suffered on the fifteenth anniversary of Laurie Bouton’s death. It exposed a condition of cerebral amyloid angiopathy and presented him the first and only challenge he couldn’t take on as successfully as he had others. It didn’t rob his intelligence, but his intelligence made him too aware of what he’d lose.

The most famous single line in Ball Four is the one that closed it: “You see, you spend a good part of your life gripping a baseball, and it turns out that it was the other way around all along.” On the day of Bouton’s death in 2019, his ability to speak gone, “in the netherworld between life and death,” his wife put a baseball into his right hand.

In his final act of life on earth, Bouton did with that ball what Nathanson’s biography will do to you once you open the covers and start reading. He gripped it tight.

Jim Bouton, RIP: The grip

Posted on July 10, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

Jim Bouton steps forth from Commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s office and the meeting in which Kuhn tried to suppress Ball Four—based entirely on a magazine excerpt.

Fifty years ago Jim Bouton pitched the season he would record to write Ball Four. Once a glittering Yankee prospect reduced to relief pitching thanks to arm trouble that arose after the 1964 World Series, Bouton’s wryly candid notes, asides, and observations while pitching for the expansion Seattle Pilots and the Astros both humanised and scandalised baseball and enough of its actual or reputed guardians.

By now, of course, Ball Four is the only sports book included on the New York Public Library’s list of 20th Century Books of the Century. And Bouton died Wednesday at 80, at the Massachussetts home he shared with his second wife, Paula Kurman.

A 2012 stroke left Bouton to suffer cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a brain disease linked to dementia that compromised his ability to speak and write. Making it worse: the stroke occurred on the fifteenth anniversary of his daughter Laurie’s death in a New Jersey automobile accident.

Baseball may have gone ballistic when Ball Four hit the ground running in 1970, and Bouton could never be certain whether the Astros sent him down that year because he wasn’t pitching well or because the book was driving the front office and others out of their gourds. But he out-lived enough of his critics, most of the time the living and breathing evidence of the maxim about living well and the best revenge.

And Ball Four keeps company on the New York Public Library list with the likes of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac, John Dos Passos, Albert Camus, Agatha Christie, Grace Metalious, and Tom Wolfe.

Go ahead. Say if you must that Bouton didn’t exactly write The Waste Land, Light in August, Invisible Man, On the Road, or The Bonfire of the Vanities. But then T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac, and Tom Wolfe never had to try throwing to Harmon Killebrew, Carl Yastrzemski, Frank Robinson, Lou Brock, Frank Howard, or Willie Mays and living to tell about it, either.

To say Ball Four was received less than approvingly around baseball is to say Baltimore needed breathing treatments after the Mets flattened the Orioles four straight following a Game One loss in the 1969 World Series. “F@ck you, Shakespeare!” was Pete Rose’s review, hollered while Bouton had a rough relief outing against the Reds. All things to come considered, it was a wonder Rose knew Shakespeare wasn’t something the tavern served on tap.

Nicknamed Bulldog in his pitching days, Bouton would have been the first to say how fortunate he was to have met and married Kurman, an academic and speech therapist who holds a Columbia University doctorate in interpersonal communications, and who has worked with brain damaged children during her career. She worked with her husband carefully and helped him re-gain much of his speaking ability despite his illness.

“Together we make a whole person,” Kurman once told a Society for American Baseball Research panel, to laughter that was sad as much as approving.

But Bouton struggled concurrently with what Kurman told Tyler Kepner of the New York Times was “a pothole syndrome: Things will seem smooth, his wit and vocabulary intact, and then there will be a sudden, unforeseen gap in his reasoning, or a concept he cannot quite grasp.”

Teammates were divided mostly over Ball Four; they seemed less offended by Bouton’s vivid descriptions of the lopsided contract talks too many players experienced before the free agency era than by his candid descriptions of their clubhouse, off-field, and road off-field activities.

“The first thing I have to tell people,” said his Seattle roommate and fellow pitcher Gary Bell, with whom Bouton maintained a lifelong friendship to follow, “is that you’re not [fornicating] Adolf Hitler.” Bouton wrote in his book that being Bell’s roommate helped make him slightly more tolerable amidst teammates who weren’t exactly forward-looking or thinking. “Every year,” Bouton said of Bell, “I receive a Christmas card addressed to ‘Ass Eyes’.”

Bouton long believed fellow pitcher Fred Talbot (who died six years ago) was the teammate who was quoted anonymously as saying Bouton’s prose “would gag a maggot.” (“When I asked Fred how he was doing,” Bouton would remember in Ball Four‘s tenth anniversary edition’s postscript, “Ball Five,” after a where-is-he-now call to Talbot, “he said, ‘Well, I’m still living,’ and hung up. I didn’t even get a chance to tell him I was glad.”)

And before the Astros sent him to the minors, where he entered what proved a first retirement, unknown members of the Padres left a burned copy of Ball Four on the Astros’ dugout steps.

He got a delicious chance to write about the reaction/overreaction to Ball Four in the just-as-delightful I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally, from then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s active attempt to suppress Ball Four to New York Daily News sportswriting legend Dick Young ripping him as a “social leper” for having written the book. When Bouton met Young in the clubhouse after that column, Young said hello and Bouton couldn’t resist replying, “Hi Dick, I didn’t know you were talking to social lepers these days.” Young replied genially, “Well, I’m glad you didn’t take it personally.” Little did Young know.

Bouton’s most famous words may well be the ones with which he ended Ball Four: “You spend a good part of your life gripping a baseball, and it turns out that it was the other way around.” But in I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally, it may have been an exercise in futility for him to write, ““I think it’s possible that you can view people as heroes and at the same time understand that they are people, too, imperfect, narrow sometimes, even not very good at what they do. I didn’t smash any heroes or ruin the game for anybody. You want heroes, you can have them. Heroes exist in the mind, anyway.”

Bouton enjoys a dance with his wife, Paula Kurman, at their Massachussetts home; the couple once competed as ballroom dance partners.

It took a very long time for baseball people to get it. Even longer than it took them to get that the late Jim Brosnan, a decade earlier, wasn’t trying to smash heroes or ruin a game when he wrote The Long Season and Pennant Race, and Brosnan didn’t go half as far as Bouton went in revealing baseball’s inner sanctum even if Brosnan incurred comparable wrath.

“I had . . . violated the idolatrous image of big leaguers who had been previously portrayed as models of modesty, loyalty and sobriety — i.e., what they were really not like,” Brosnan wrote on the 40th anniversary republication of Pennant Race. “Finally, I had actually written the book by myself, thus trampling upon the tradition that a player should hire a sportswriter to do the work. I was, on these accounts, a sneak and a snob and a scab.”

Bouton wrote and recorded Ball Four by himself, too, his editor Leonard Shecter doing nothing much more than knocking it into book-readable condition, as he would for I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally. It didn’t stop Kuhn from hauling Bouton into his office and trying to jam down the pitcher’s throat a statement saying he hadn’t meant it and the whole thing was Shecter’s fault.

Both pitchers were very aware of the worlds around them, and both wrote about the periodic spells of boredom, racial tensions, off-field skirt chasings, and self-doubts endemic in their professional baseball lives. Brosnan saved them for his books and articles; Bouton was less reluctant to speak his mind about things like politics, Vietnam, and civil rights when asked or when a conversation left him the opening.

Bouton bought even less into the still-lingering press representations of athletes as heroes. Teammates didn’t always hold with that or other things, like calling them out on it when they made mistakes that cost the Yankees games he pitched.

“After two or three years of playing with guys like [Mickey] Mantle and [Roger] Maris,” he wrote in I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally, “I was no longer awed. I started to look at those guys as people and I didn’t like what I saw. They were fine as baseball heroes. As men they were not quite so successful. At the same time I guess I started to rub a lot of people the wrong way. Instead of being a funny rookie, I was a veteran wise guy. I reached the point where I would argue to support my opinion and that didn’t go down too well either.”

“He stands out,” Shecter wrote of Bouton in Sport, “because he is a decent young man in a game which does not recognize decency as valuable.” Much the same thing was said of Brosnan no matter what particular writers did or didn’t think of his two books.

For decades Bouton believed Ball Four got him blackballed from the Yankees in terms of Old-Timer’s Days and other such events involving team alumni, and that Mantle was the instigator. When one of Mantle’s sons died in the mid-1990s, Bouton left a message of sympathy on Mantle’s answering machine. To Bouton’s surprise, Mantle himself called to thank Bouton and, by the way, say that it wasn’t Mantle who put Bouton in the Yankee deep freeze.

Laurie Bouton’s death prompted her oldest of two brothers, Michael, to write an astonishing op-ed piece in The New York Times calling for the Yankees to reconcile with both his father and with Hall of Famer Yogi Berra, estranged ever since George Steinbrenner fired him as manager through an intermediary in the 1980s. Michael Bouton got what he asked for. In both regards. (Yankee Stadium rocked especially with a section occupied by Laurie’s friends, holding a banner hollering LAURIE’S GIRLS!)

When Bouton retired the first time in 1970, he assembled another book, a splendid anthology of writings about baseball managers and managing called “I Managed Good But, Boy, Did They Play Bad,” then became a sportscaster for New York ABC and CBS. As his first marriage was falling apart, Bouton also tried a baseball comeback. He slogged the minors a couple of years before then-Braves owner Ted Turner abetted his September callup in 1978. After a start that prompted such comments as, “It was like facing Bozo the Clown,” as Bouton eventually recorded (in “Ball Five”), “In his next start, Bozo the Clown beat the San Francisco Giants. The pennant-contending San Francisco Giants.”

Then he tangled with Astros howitzer J.R. Richard. “The young flamethrower and the old junkballer,” Bouton described them. On the same night the towering Richard broke the National League’s single-season strikeout record for righthanded pitchers, the old junkballer fought the young flamethrower to a draw, somehow. In the interim, Bouton and a Portland Mavericks teammate named Rob Nelson cooked up the concoction that became Big League Chew gum, the kind that looked shredded like chewing tobacco, and its success made some nice dollars for Bouton and Nelson.

Bouton ended his brief baseball comeback, satisfied that he’d proven what he tried to prove, and also became a motivational speaker who also continued writing as well as joining his second wife administering a recreational 19th century-style baseball league, helping preserve an old ballpark (about which Bouton wrote Foul Ball), and becoming a competition ballroom dancing team. The Renaissance Bulldog.

Whenever one of Bouton’s former Ball Four-season teammates went to his reward, Bouton was genuinely saddened. “I think he came, over the years, to love them,” Kurman told Kepner. “As each one died, he got really teary about it. He realized how deeply they were part of him.” (The Pilots, of course, were sold and moved to Milwaukee for the 1970 season, becoming the Brewers. “The old Pilots are a ghost team,” Bouton once wrote, “doomed forever to circumnavigate the globe in the pages of a book.”)

Ball Four‘s true success, wrote Roger Angell himself (one more time: Angell isn’t baseball’s Homer; Homer was ancient Greece’s Roger Angell), “is Mr. Bouton himself, as a day-to-day observer, hard thinker, marvellous listener, comical critic, angry victim, and unabashed lover of a sport. What he has given us is a rare view of a highly complex public profession seen from the innermost side, along with an ironic and courageous mind. And, very likely, the funniest book of the year.”

Baseball didn’t collapse. The world didn’t implode. That Star Spangled Banner yet waves. Things have happened in baseball since that make any outrage over Ball Four resemble the kindergarten style debate most of the original hoopla really was. “If Mickey Mantle had written Ball Four,” Bouton once wrote, “it wouldn’t have been a big deal. A marginal relief pitcher on the Seattle Pilots had no business writing a book.” Or, implicitly, exposing the foibles and more of the reserve era’s abuses than anyone suspected existed within the Old Ball Game.

The marginal relief pitcher, once a Yankee World Series star, ended up meaning far more than that. If you want to call Bouton part of the conscience of baseball, then you must admit with more than a single tear that baseball lost something precious with his illness and, now, his death. So has his wife. So have their children and grandchildren. So has America. May the Lord and his beloved daughter welcome him home gently but happily.

A tale of two literary baseball seasons

Posted on February 15, 2019 by Jeff Kallman

The books they said would subvert baseball. The game goes ever onward and the books never remain out of print. (So far.) Fifty years ago, Jim Bouton pitched his Ball Four season; ten years before that, Jim Brosnan pitched The Long Season.

The New York Public Library’s list of 20th century Books of the Century includes only one book pertaining to sports, Jim Bouton’s Ball Four. Yes, I was surprised, too, considering such volumes as Jim Brosnan’s The Long Season, anything by Roger Angell (one more time: he isn’t baseball’s Homer, Homer was ancient Greece’s Roger Angell), Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, Mark Harris’s Bang the Drum Slowly, and Arnold Hano’s A Day in the Bleachers, among others.

But there Bouton’s volume reposes, in a club to which also belong T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac, John Dos Passos, Albert Camus, Agatha Christie, Grace Metalious, and Tom Wolfe. Before you retort that Bouton didn’t exactly write The Waste Land, Light in August, Invisible Man, On the Road, or The Bonfire of the Vanities, it’s only fair to say that Eliot, Faulkner, Ellison, Kerouac, and Wolfe never had to try sneaking a pitch past Carl Yastrzemski, Lou Brock, Harmon Killebrew, or Willie Mays, either.

Bouton was with the Astros when Ball Four was published in April 1970, after excerpts appeared in Look. To say it was received less than approvingly around baseball is to say Baltimore needed breathing treatments after the Mets flattened the Orioles four straight following a Game One loss in the 1969 World Series. “F@ck you, Shakespeare!” was Pete Rose’s review, hollered while Bouton had a rough relief outing against the Reds. All things to come considered, it was a wonder Rose knew Shakespeare wasn’t a brew served on tap at the ballpark.

This year is the fiftieth anniversary season of the one Bouton recorded for Ball Four and the sixtieth anniversary of the one animating Brosnan’s The Long Season. The books have their common ground and their distinctions, chief among the latter being that Bouton didn’t shy from detailing things even Brosnan, whose candor was considered jolting enough in its own time and place, didn’t dare to tread. If Brosnan even hinted at them, it was euphemistically. Bouton didn’t bother with euphemisms.

The two pitchers have something sadder in common, too. Brosnan suffered a stroke from which he was recovering when sepsis came manifest and caused his death in 2014 at 82, a year after his wife of 62 years died. Bouton, on the threshold of 80, suffered a stroke in 2012 that left him with cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a brain disease linked to dementia and compromised his ability to speak and write. Making it worse: the stroke occurred on the fifteenth anniversary of his daughter Laurie’s death in a New Jersey automobile accident.

Bouton’s wife, Paula Kurman, a speech therapist among other things (she has a Columbia University doctorate in interpersonal communications) who has worked with brain damaged children during her career, has worked with him carefully (“Together we make a whole person,” she once told a Society for American Baseball Research panel, to laughter that was sad as much as approving) and he has regained much of his speaking ability.

But he continues to struggle with what Kurman told Tyler Kepner of the New York Times was “a pothole syndrome: Things will seem smooth, his wit and vocabulary intact, and then there will be a sudden, unforeseen gap in his reasoning, or a concept he cannot quite grasp.”

Brosnan’s book was seeded two years before The Long Season‘s focus when he bumped into Sports Illustrated editor Bob Boyle. Having heard the bespectacled reliever had ideas about writing a book about major league baseball, Boyle suggested an article first “if something significant happens.” Brosnan turned in an essay about his trade from the Cubs to the Cardinals for veteran shortstop Alvin Dark, a trade one reporter described as the Cubs committing theft by trading “a mutt for a pedigreed pooch.”

“Loved it,” Boyle told Brosnan. “Why don’t you write a book about a whole season?” Two years later, that’s exactly what Brosnan did. He praised and needled in the same arch but honest tone, even if he did sanitize much of the vocabulary of the locker room or the dugout, as Bouton wouldn’t need to do a decade later. He showed the better and lesser sides of several players, but even his needles seemed not to come from malice aforethought.

Bouton was approached to do what became Ball Four by iconoclastic sports writer/editor Leonard Shecter, who’d previously written an in-depth profile of Bouton for Sport. Shecter proposed an in-season diary somewhat along Brosnan’s lines. “Funny you should mention that,” Bouton replied. “I’ve been taking notes.” During the 1969 season, Bouton would observe of his teammates, “My note-taking is beginning to make the natives restless.”

Brosnan offered no sense of wanting any kind of revenge for any kind of slight, in an era when players were too often slighted under a system that kept them, in essence, indentured servants. (One reviewer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote that Brosnan’s “pot shots,” such as they were, didn’t enrage fellow players “because ballplayers didn’t read; it was so out of character, or so he said.”) Bouton was often accused of trying to settle scores, particularly about the Yankees, his former team about whom he wrote and spoke extensively enough when the occasion suggested it. All Brosnan and Bouton did was try to show baseball and its players, coaches, managers, and administrators, as a too-human game played and run with too-human foibles, follies, and fantasias alike.

The devil was really in the details and even the language in Ball Four, from neither of which Bouton shied a single step. But both pitchers were accused of a kind of insider trading for fun and profit. “Brosnan has his say about many who may have, in times past, had their say about him,” wrote Bill Veeck of The Long Season, at a time Veeck still owned the White Sox. “This just doesn’t seem to come off so well, and tends to lessen the impact and enjoyment of his undeniably colorful material.” Presumably, Veeck took his own critique to heart when writing his own Veeck—as in Wreck, which did for baseball executives’ memoiring what Brosnan and later Bouton did for players’, and what Veeck did even further with his subsequent The Hustler’s Handbook.

“As an active player on a big-league team I had seemingly taken undue advantage by recording an insider’s viewpoint on what some professional baseball players were really like,” Brosnan wrote, after The Long Season and Pennant Race (his followup, about the 1961 Reds’ unexpected National League pennant winner) were republished on the latter’s season’s fortieth anniversary. “I had, moreover, violated the idolatrous image of big leaguers who had been previously portrayed as models of modesty, loyalty and sobriety — i.e., what they were really not like. Finally, I had actually written the book by myself, thus trampling upon the tradition that a player should hire a sportswriter to do the work. I was, on these accounts, a sneak and a snob and a scab.”

Bouton got the chance to address the hoopla around Ball Four in a followup book, I’m Glad You Didn’t Take it Personally (its jacket featured a baseball with a blackened eye drawn onto the hide) which was just as funny as Ball Four and sometimes a lot more poignant. “I think it’s possible,” he wrote, “that you can view people as heroes and at the same time understand that they are people, too, imperfect, narrow sometimes, even not very good at what they do. I didn’t smash any heroes or ruin the game for anybody. You want heroes, you can have them. Heroes exist in the mind, anyway.”

Or, out of their minds, if you ponder one reaction to Ball Four. Before the Astros farmed Bouton out in 1970, Bouton discovered a burned copy of the book on the steps of the dugout, courtesy of the Padres. Even Brosnan’s and Veeck’s books avoided that kind of grotesquery.

The worst to happen to Brosnan after The Long Season and Pennant Race, not to mention other essays published in several other magazines, was the White Sox (to whom Brosnan was traded early in the 1963 season, long after Veeck sold the team) inserting a clause in his proposed 1964 contract barring him from writing for publication without prior team approval. Refusing to sign a contract with a clause like that in it, Brosnan retired after no other team took even a flyer on him, despite both Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News taking his side.

Bouton was either reviled as “a social leper” or a cancer on the game for having written and published Ball Four. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn actually tried to suppress the book, hauling Bouton into his office, demanding Bouton sign a statement saying it was all the pernicious work of his editor Shecter. Bouton probably had to restrain himself from telling Kuhn where to shove the statement when he wasn’t trying to restrain himself from laughing.

It was Dick Young of the New York Daily News who described Bouton as a social leper for writing Ball Four. When he ran into Bouton on an Astros visit to Shea Stadium, he said hello and, when Bouton needled him for talking to social lepers, Young replied, “Well, I’m glad you didn’t take it personally.” That reply gave Bouton the title of his followup book, in which he credited such overreactions in the sports press for doing almost the most to ensure Ball Four a best seller.

Both pitchers were witty, literate, and not even close to being thoroughgoing jocks. Brosnan made his way as a competent if mostly unspectacular relief pitcher and spot starter with a strong slider who had his moments. Bouton was a promising, hard throwing Yankee starting star, with a live fastball and a hard curve ball, until two seasons of overwork (1963 and 1964, and a whopping 520.2 innings over the two) left him with arm and shoulder trouble (it began a third of the way through 1964) that reduced him to marginal relief work and prompted him to make the knuckleball, which he’d thrown only as a change of pace previously, his bread and butter pitch.

Brosnan kept so many books in his locker that his 1961 Reds teammate, Hall of Famer Frank Robinson, nicknamed him the Professor. Bouton was no less literate or cerebral, though he may not have had a locker library equal to Brosnan’s, but his early ferocity as a competitor (he was once famous for his cap falling off his head as he delivered) inspired New York Post writer Maury Allen to nickname him Bulldog.

But Bouton may have put baseball into perspective even more than Brosnan did. Both pitchers were very aware of the worlds around them, and both wrote about the periodic spells of boredom, racial tensions, off-field skirt chasings, and self-doubts endemic in their professional baseball lives. Brosnan saved them for his books and articles; Bouton was less reluctant to speak his mind about things like politics, Vietnam, and civil rights when asked or when a conversation left him the opening.

Brosnan’s post baseball life including writing, advertising work (he’d done it in the offseasons of his pitching career), occasional sportscasting, and raising his family in the same Illinois home he bought with his wife, Anne, in 1956. (When they married, one local story’s headline, referencing his wife’s maiden name, said, “Pitcher Marries Pitcher.”)

Bouton became a sports anchor for New York ABC and then CBS before trying a baseball comeback in the White Sox system and then with the independent (some say notorious) Portland Mavericks, a comeback that ended with getting five starts for the Braves in late 1978. In one of those starts, Bouton squared off against Astros legend J.R. Richard, on the same night Richard broke the National League single-season strikeout record for righthanders, and pitched Richard to a draw. “The young flamethrower against the old junkballer,” Bouton wrote of the game.

A concoction Bouton and Mavericks teammate Rob Nelson invented in the bullpen, shredding gum into strands similar to chewing tobacco, became a hit as Big League Chew when they sold the idea to Wrigley. Bouton also continued writing, became a motivational speaker, and survived the collapse of his first marriage to meet and marry Kurman, blending two families, becoming founders and leaders of a recreational baseball league playing by 19th century rules, and becoming competition ballroom dancers. The Renaissance Bulldog.

The Washington Post‘s distinguished literary critic Jonathan Yardley wrote of The Long Season that it was literature about “[a]n ordinary season — life as it’s really lived — rather than an extraordinary one.” You could say, then, that Pennant Race was literature about an extraordinary season lived and played by ordinary men, if you don’t count Frank Robinson. Ball Four, which ran more temperatures higher up scales than Brosnan could claim, could be called an ordinary season lived and played by ordinary men. Recorded by a man whose extraordinary side was eroded by injuries.

Bouton may have hit the true key as to why all three books also unnerved baseball and its assorted establishments. “If Mickey Mantle had written Ball Four,” he later remembered, “it wouldn’t have been a big deal. A marginal relief pitcher on the Seattle Pilots had no business writing a book.” Likewise, if Robinson or Stan Musial had written The Long Season (Brosnan began 1959 with the Cardinals but was traded to the Reds midway) instead of a middle relief pitcher, it might not have proven a big deal.

Brosnan’s and Bouton’s books became baseball classics (as did Veeck—as in Wreck), and Ball Four also helped further expose the abuses heaped on players by front offices before the end of the reserve clause but probably caused no few of its younger readers to become sports journalists themselves. One suspects even now that Bouton’s revelations about the one-sided contract negotiations to which reserve era players were subject might have infuriated the purists more than his revelations about players’ sex drives, amphetamine indulgences, pranks, and feuds did.

Whenever one of Bouton’s former Ball Four-season teammates goes to his reward, Bouton is genuinely saddened. “I think he came, over the years, to love them,” Kurman told Kepner. “As each one died, he got really teary about it. He realized how deeply they were part of him.” (The Pilots, of course, were sold and moved to Milwaukee for the 1970 season, becoming the Brewers. Writing in Ball Four Plus Ball Five, a tenth-anniversary update, Bouton said, “The old Pilots are a ghost team, doomed forever to circumnavigate the globe in the pages of a book.”)

The Long Season remains “a cocky book, caustic and candid and, in a way, courageous, for Brosnan calls him like he sees them, doesn’t hesitate to name names, and employs ridicule like a stiletto,” as wrote Red Smith, arguably the best baseball writer in New York (then with the Herald-Tribune).

Ball Four‘s true success, wrote Roger Angell himself, “is Mr. Bouton himself, as a day-to-day observer, hard thinker, marvellous listener, comical critic, angry victim, and unabashed lover of a sport. What he has given us is a rare view of a highly complex public profession seen from the innermost side, along with an ironic and courageous mind. And, very likely, the funniest book of the year.”

And in the long, long, long wake of Brosnan’s and Bouton’s books, baseball hasn’t collapsed, the world hasn’t imploded, that Star Spangled Banner yet waves, and men and women of note or fame can be considered in all their human flaws, foibles, and fantasias, without being seen where appropriate as any less than heroes.

Throneberry Fields Forever

. . . a calm review of baseball

Tag Archives: Ball Four

“He was my North Star, and I was his”

One more grip of Jim Bouton

Jim Bouton, RIP: The grip

A tale of two literary baseball seasons