By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2017/07/01/from-gripping-a-knuckleball-to-brain-disease-gripping-jim-bouton/Freshly-deceased Anthony Young, hapless Mets pitcher, showed grace under the harrowing pressure of a record-
breaking losing streak and in refusing to let the inoperable brain tumour that killed him last week knock him
down. Now another New York baseball legend shows his own grace under the pressure of insidious brain disease.
And, unlike some of the reaction he got when he published the book that changed his and baseball’s life irrevocably,
there won’t be many wisecracks about former Yankee, Pilots, Astros, and Braves pitcher Jim Bouton’s brain making
for a good dog’s breakfast.
Bouton planned to spend this weekend going public, at the Society for American Baseball Research’s New York
convention, with his diagnosis of cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a condition linked to dementia. The likely trigger
was a stroke he suffered in August 2012—on the anniversary of his daughter Laurie’s death at 31 in a New Jersey
traffic accident.
His body wasn’t much affected by the stroke, but his mind—impacted already by a smaller previous stroke treated
with blood thinners his doctor called “catastrophic” since it led to a frontal lobe hemorrhage that “essentially wiped
out” Bouton’s language abilities,
according to the New York Times‘ Tyler Kepner.
“He had to relearn how to read, write, speak and understand,” Kepner continues.
Bouton’s fortune includes his wife of 35 years, Paula Kurman, Ph.D., who “had worked with brain-damaged children
many years before, and recognized troubling signs in her husband: repeating questions, difficulty organizing and
categorizing information. A visit to (neurologist Dr. Alec) Kloman confirmed that Bouton was suffering from more
than the aftereffects of a stroke. He had mild cognitive impairment.”
“The blessing is there’s no physical pain,” Kurman told Kepner. “The awful blow is the very thing which enabled
him to write
Ball Four is mangled — something he prides himself on, and he’s not going to get back to that level
again.”
There were those who thought Bouton himself was mangled for having written
Ball Four in the first place.
He picked up where the late Jim Brosnan (
The Long Season,
Pennant Race) left off, going deeper in
revealing baseball’s clubhouse and administrative culture than even the candid enough Brosnan ever did, not to
mention first exposes into previously unseen sides to Mickey Mantle and the last old-guard dynastic Yankees.
Ball Four—about Bouton’s 1969 with the Seattle Pilots and the Houston Astros—was both an expose and
a self examination that 1970 baseball wasn’t quite ready to behold.
Commissioner Bowie Kuhn actively and clumsily tried to suppress the book—based on nothing more than an excerpt
he’d read in
Life. Unknown members of the San Diego Padres left charred copies of the book on the dugout
steps of the Houston Astros, with whom Bouton played when the book was published. Pete Rose screamed at Bouton
across the field, “F@ck you, Shakespeare.”
And Dick Young, then still with the
New York Daily News and still one of the country’s more powerful sportswriters,
called Bouton a “social leper”:
He didn’t catch it, he developed it. His collaborator on the book, Leonard
Shecter, is a social leper. People like this, embittered people, sit down in their time
of deepest rejection and write. They write, oh hell, everybody stinks, everybody but
me, and it makes them feel much better.
The day after that column appeared, Bouton bumped into Young in the Shea Stadium visitors’ clubhouse, where the
Astros were preparing to play the Mets. “Hi, Jim,” Young hailed him, cheerfully enough. “Hi, Dick,” Bouton replied.
“I didn’t know you were talking to social lepers these days.” Young smiled nervously before replying, “Well, I’m glad
you didn’t take it personally.”
That exchange gave Bouton the perfect title
for his second book, which was written mostly about the hoopla
Ball
Four provoked and partially about Bouton’s adjustment out of baseball and, at first, into local broadcasting as
a sports reporter for WABC and WCBS television in New York. Meanwhile, Players Association Marvin Miller asked,
and Bouton consented, that
Ball Four be used as evidence in the Andy Messersmith-Dave McNally case that
ushered in the free agency era.
Bouton also made a brief, memorable comeback to pitching with the Atlanta Braves, in 1978, including a start during
which he fought J.R. Richard to a draw—”the young flamethrower and the old junkballer,” Bouton called it in
Ball
Four Plus Ball Five, added to the book on the original’s tenth anniversary—on the night Richard smashed the
National League single-season strikeout record for righthanders.
“Some of the players I didn’t really like that much, but I was listening to them, and they became interesting,” Bouton
told Kepner, during a visit at Bouton’s Massachussetts home, explaining his original note-taking for what became
Ball
Four. “I had no idea. They were funny, interesting characters.”
A lot of them didn’t think he was. Bouton’s roommate, pitcher Gary Bell, who remains a friend (“Every year, I get a
Christmas card addressed to ‘Ass Eyes’,” Bouton once wrote of Bell), found himself “having to convince people that
[he's] not f@cking Adolf Hitler.” His second Pilots roommate, outfielder Steve Hovley, remains a friend.
But fellow pitcher Fred Talbot remained suspicious of Bouton, once been a Yankee teammate as well. ”Well, I’m still
living,” said Talbot in 1980, when Bouton called as part of assembling his
Ball Five postscript. Lamented Bouton, “He
hung up. I didn’t even get a chance to tell him I was glad.” (Talbot died of cancer in 2013; Bouton once wrote he
believed Talbot had said of
Ball Four that his prose “could gag a maggot.”) And Steve Barber never forgave Bouton
for scoring him over his refusal to go to the minors to rehabilitate his always-bothersome arm. (Barber died of
pneumonia ten years ago.)
“I think he came, over the years, to love them,” Kurman wife told Kepner. (Kurman and Bouton met as Bouton’s
first marriage collapsed, when Bouton was mounting his comeback in the Braves’ organisation. “The Magic Lady,”
he called her in
Ball Four Plus Ball Five.) “As each one died, he got really teary about it. He realized how deeply
they were part of him.”
Including and especially Mickey Mantle, who left Bouton a message that he hadn’t tried to have him blackballed
from Yankee old-timer’s events, after Bouton left Mantle a message of condolence when one of his sons died.
Bouton keeps that recording and a framed photograph of himself, Mantle, and the late Yogi Berra in his home.
(After his daughter’s death, Bouton picked up a
Times to read
his oldest son’s Father’s Day plea for him and for
Berra to be reconciled to the Yankees, which happened. Bouton’s two sons and Kurman’s son and daughter live
away from Massachussetts; Bouton and Kurman have six grandchildren.)
Bouton’s physical limitations may be very few; once a competitive ballroom dancer with his wife, he can still
throw a knuckleball, the pitch he taught himself to stay in the majors after his arm trouble robbed his fastball,
and likes to do that a couple of times a week. It’s the cognitive robbery that affects him now. His wife learned
from working with brain-damaged children that the key is to think about what’s still there, not what’s gone.
She never thought she’d have to think that way with her own husband, who admits frustration that he has to
explain, sometimes, something he’s just written or said. ”You need to learn,” she told Kepner, “that the person
is still that person, and you have to focus more on what he can do, rather than what he can’t do. And then
you adjust.”
For one of baseball’s classic wits—who was once a terrific pitcher until his arm began to betray him in 1965—
it certainly could be worse. A journalistic and lexicographic wit from an earlier generation, H.L. Mencken,
suffered a stroke in 1948, not long after covering the Democratic National Convention.
The Sage of Baltimore lived the final eight years of his life unable to read or write at all, content to listen to
classical music, long bereft of the company of his wife who died young, thirteen years before his stroke.
Bouton may have to explain his writing or speaking now, but he’s luckier. His wife isn’t going anywhere.
Neither, apparently, is his spirit.
The dance is very different now for Jim Bouton and his wife Paula Kurman.
