“An irreverent, best-selling book that angered baseball’s hierarchy and changed the way journalists and fans viewed the sports world.” - The Washington Post Read moreĬopyright © 1970, 1981, 1990, 2000 by Jim BoutonĬover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2012, 2020 by RosettaBooks, LLCĪll rights reserved. Includes a new foreword by Jim Bouton's wife, Paula Kurman To call it simply a ‘tell all book’ is like describing The Grapes of Wrath as a book about harvesting peaches in California.” “It’s a vibrant, funny, telling history of an era that seems even further away than four decades.
“It is not just a diary of Bouton’s 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros,” says sportswriter Jim Caple. Today Ball Four has taken on another role-as a time capsule of life in the sixties. a book deep in the American vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book.” David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting on Vietnam, wrote a piece in Harper’s that said of Bouton: “He has written . . .
Fans liked discovering that athletes were real people-often wildly funny people. It was even banned by a few libraries.Īlmost everyone else, however, loved Ball Four. Ballplayers, most of whom hadn’t read it, denounced the book. 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. When Ball Four was published in 1970, it created a firestorm.
The 50th Anniversary edition of “the book that changed baseball” (NPR), chosen by Time magazine as one of the “100 Greatest Non-Fiction” books.
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