Bouton Still Having a Ball

Jim Bouton, perennial pariah of Major League Baseball, arrives at semipro Bassanio Field wearing a bemused grin above his orange tank top, baseball pants, socks and spikes. In his right hand is a plastic box containing a newly passed kidney stone--his career 20th. His teammates on the Little Ferry Giants crowd around him to mock and gawk.

“It’s a macho thing to them,” says Bouton, 51, who will pitch tonight. “They think I’m real tough.”

In the cinder-block dugout, Bouton files his fingernails to get a better grip when he tosses his trademark knuckle ball, a hard-to-control pitch that flutters, dives and wiggles its way to home plate.

Yes, sports literature devotees, this is the former New York Yankee and Seattle Pilot, who gave the baseball establishment the heebie-jeebies 20 years ago with his book, “Ball Four,” a diary that dared to say players drank, took pep pills and philandered.

Newly reissued in a 20th anniversary edition, “Ball Four” is about as old as Bouton’s semipro teammates, most of whom haven’t even read it. “It’s an American classic that we’re introducing to a new generation,” Macmillan senior editor Rick Wolff, says of the book, which sold almost five million copies in hardcover and paperback.

Bouton, blond hair flecked with gray and leaner than in his major-league playing days, pitches in the New Jersey Metropolitan League for fun and no money, enjoying the pitcher-batter confrontation and the camaraderie of teammates 25 to 30 years his junior. Several say they hope to play as well when they approach the state of Bouton’s codgerhood.

“This is the closest I’ve ever been to being one of the boys, even though I’m older than all of them and we go our separate ways when we leave the field,” says Bouton, a lifelong outsider who rarely felt he fit in with his childhood friends and Major League Baseball teammates.

“Ball Four”--for which he scribbled notes by day and tape recorded by night--forever stamped him an outcast and secured his two-sided reputation. To some he was an irreverent pitcher-turned-rabble-rousing author. But to baseball’s reigning powers, Bouton’s sharp-eyed diary of his 1969 season with the Houston Astros and a short-lived and dreadful expansion team called the Seattle Pilots--established him as a flake-turned-traitor.

“Everybody thought I was writing a regular sports book,” says Bouton. “They didn’t realize I was writing about things like an argument between catcher Merritt Ranew and pitcher Fred Talbot in the bullpen about which part of the South was dumber.” The memory still tickles Bouton into compulsive laughter. “Nobody had better material to write than I did.”

The scandalous bits--about night forays to hotel roofs to spy on women as they undressed, Mickey Mantle hitting a home run while hung over, and absurdist contract talks with miserly team officials over tiny sums--seem tame now and are only small parts of the book. But in 1970, they gave the conservative baseball establishment severe agita.

After the first excerpt from “Ball Four” appeared in Look magazine in June, 1970, then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn reprimanded Bouton, demanded that he renounce his book and asked him to sign a pledge that he would never write about baseball as long as he remained a player. Bouton refused.

“What a dweeb,” Bouton says, recounting the meeting with Kuhn.

Former Yankee pitcher Whitey Ford, Bouton’s teammate for six seasons, angers at the mention of “Ball Four,” which said Ford made baseballs dance eccentrically by nicking them with his wedding ring or having his catcher rub them with mud. The catcher, Elston Howard, later said angrily that he performed the same service for Bouton.

“Is ‘Ball Four’ what you want to talk about?” Ford asks. “Well, I didn’t read the book. I don’t like the man who wrote it. That’s all I have to say.”

The years after “Ball Four” saw an explosion of tell-all star memoirs, many of them revealing far more about players’ off-the-field exploits than anything Bouton revealed. But none of the descendants, including best-selling eyebrow-raisers like ex-Yankee Sparky Lyle’s “The Bronx Zoo,” quarterback Jim McMahon’s “McMahon!” and former Seattle Seahawk linebacker Brian Bosworth’s “The Boz”--have had “Ball Four’s” bemused vantage point.

David Halberstam, an early fan of “Ball Four” and the author of the best-selling baseball book “The Summer of ‘49,” says it was a “breakthrough in iconoclasm. Here was an unconventional guy who had the chutzpah to point out that the gods had the gall to do ungodlike things.”

Bouton left baseball soon after the book’s publication. The Astros had sent him to their minor league team in Oklahoma City, effectively ending his career.

Within weeks, Bouton left the minors and became a broadcaster in New York City with the local ABC and CBS affiliates, but the pariah found his true niche in oddball baseball-related businesses.

Big League Chew, strips of gum packaged like chewing tobacco, has been his biggest hit. It was devised by Rob Nelson, his free-spirited teammate on the minor-league Portland, Ore., Mavericks in 1978, when Bouton launched a comeback that landed him briefly on the Atlanta Braves. Bouton and Nelson licensed Big League Chew to William Wrigley Co. in a deal that nets the two an annual six-figure royalty income.

Bouton extended Big League into ice cream in April when Good Humor created Big League Ice Cream--a chocolate-covered vanilla pop on sticks shaped like baseball bats with 26 different players’ autographs.

Bouton also gives motivational talks, urging businessmen to enjoy their jobs. “Forget the money, the bottom line, the sales figures,” he preaches. “When you concentrate on the fun, you reach the goals more often.”

But this is not a night of rapturous fun on the mound for Bouton. Another kidney stone is apparently coursing through his system, and muscle spasms are making his knuckle ball do things even a knuckler shouldn’t do. Manager Joe Stauffer Jr. yanks him in the fifth inning. “Sorry, Joe, I just didn’t have it tonight,” Bouton says.

Most nights he still does have it, almost as much of it as he had in two glory years as a Yankee. Despite a total of 39 wins in 1963 and 1964 and two World Series victories, he has never been invited to the annual Old Timers Day celebrations at Yankee Stadium, or, for that matter, any official baseball event.

Even Bouton’s attempt to gain favor with Kuhn’s successor, Peter Ueberroth, went unanswered.

“When Ueberroth became commissioner,” he says, “I sent him an autographed copy of ‘Ball Four’ with a note saying, ‘Here’s a book the previous commissioner didn’t enjoy, but you might get a kick out of it.’ He never sent me a thank-you note. No secretary called. Nothing.

“I tried.” the outsider laughs. “I really tried.”