2008-04-30 Essential, for many reasons

Christy Mathewson's 1912 book 'Pitching in a Pinch' was baseball's first 'inside view' of the game in which - and without attracting any criticism - Mathewson openly discussed the drinking habits of his contemporaries. On Amazon right now you can buy Jose Canseco's 'Juiced' and 'Vindicated: Big Names, Big Liars...etc.' Heck, one New York Times bestseller published in 2004 was subtitled 'A season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo chasing, and Championship Baseball with...the Rowdiest Team Ever to Put on a New York Uniform'. Those kinds of exposes of the ugly underbelly of professional baseball - each more lurid than the last - are ten-a-penny now. So why should an author and former ballplayer who wrote a similar book over 30 years ago still be considered an outcast today by many within baseball?

Jim Bouton is an aesthete, an irreverent intellectual set adrift in a culture of Neanderthals and conformers. He is also a pitcher suffering from some inner doubts about his 'stuff' and perhaps facing up to the fact that he's over the hill and having to rely upon the guile of his knuckleball rather than the power of his erstwhile fastball to break back into The Show - which in this case takes the form of the fledgling Seattle Pilots team in their expansion (and indeed only) season. Ball Four is a diary which tells about his efforts to make it back to the big leagues and the personalities and ingrained prejudices he had to overcome to do so.

So why is Bouton so ostracised by many of the baseball fraternity decades after he published a book which did nothing more than give an even handed, honest and detailed account of his 1969 season? After all, as I have already explained, in the intervening years since Ball Four was published many baseball people have published their own inside stories and exposes. Indeed, even some of Jim Bouton's 'victims' have since traded on their nefarious reputations to a far greater extent than Bouton portrayed...yet still despise him for it. So why?

The answer is that, somewhere in the 90 years between Mathewson and Boomer Wells, baseball, and the perception of baseball, changed from being a game played by "shysters, con men, drunks and outright thieves" (Bill James) from which the public stayed away in their droves, to become instead increasingly big business for players, managers and, especially, owners. The paying public wanted a National Pastime which represented their ideals - fair play, clean-cut teams of wholesome athletes, heroes. And so as the game grew more lucrative, and as the importance of the sport's public image also grew, so did the impetus for the baseball establishment to perpetuate and protect that 'peanuts and crackerjack' image, and consequently all that money.

Enter Jim Bouton - Deviant, Knuckleballer and Whistleblower.

Bouton's unforgivable crime was that he was the FIRST to break baseball's greatest taboo - the mantra which sustained and upheld the Establishment's public veneer and which was actually inscribed on a board in the Pilots' club house, the gist of which ran "whatever happens [on the road/in the clubhouse/in the team] stays [on the road/in the clubhouse/in the team]." What he illustrated in his wry day-to-day observations and disarming musings in Ball Four is a shambles; an ugly catalogue of petty small mindedness, hopeless disorganisation, inconsistency and hypocrisy at al levels of the game. The old guard of coaches, owners, managers and scouts were thoughtless, inept, duplicitous and reactionary - relying upon the kind of foundless received wisdom which was exploded so brilliantly by Billy Beane in Moneyball. The players were factional, puerile, perverted and racist.

As Bouton explains very eloquently in a postscript to Ball Four, subcultures like that of professional ballplayers need a set of shared values, they need to conform, and it helps strengthen and confirm this set of values if they can identify and focus upon a 'deviant'. Bouton was already eyed with suspicion by his peers - he did not conform, did not trot out the meaningless, trite jock sayings at the appropriate times, did not go along with the juvenile, macho cliques, was capable of independent thought, was not a 'Good Ol' Boy', did not toe the line. Even worse, he wasn't coming off a 20-win season but instead was on the fringes of the bullpen and struggling with his delivery. So he was already an ideal candidate on which to hang the deviant tag. His publishing of Ball Four confirmed that all of those prejudices projected onto the pariah Jim Bouton by his teammates for their own sakes were justified...weren't they? No, because everything Bouton says in Ball Four is right, and needed saying.

OK, he wrote the diary in secret without the knowledge of most of the people whose stupidity it exposes and so maybe betrayed their trust in a way. Also, the Seattle Pilots were probably an extreme example of the state of baseball in the late 60s (Bouton was traded to the Astros during Ball Four and found them far more professional and progressive). But the picture it revealed to the fans for the first time as it peeled back that facade of the Nation's Pastime really show that not only the book's ignorant and indignant cast deserved to be shown for what they were - but Baseball (big 'B') deserved it too....even needed it!