@Machiavelli
Jim Bouton, "I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally." I recognized that name. I did not even look through it.
@Slip18 I wrote this a few years ago, on the 40th anniversary of that book's publication:
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Jim Bouton's Forgotten Postscript (21 July 2011)
Which is worse? A baseball commissioner trying to suppress a from-the-inside book written by an
active player? An opposing team burning a copy of the book?
When Jim Bouton’s
Ball Four reached the magazine-excerpt stage and, then, full publication, in
1970, the former Yankee fastball standout, reduced by arm miseries to knuckleballing, marginal
Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros middle reliever/spot starter, had both happen. But if you wonder
whether Bouton shriveled into a shell and disappeared as a result, you don’t remember much of
his post-playing life. Not to mention the book he published a year later.
Nothing against
Ball Four, an engaging and disturbing (in a nice way) book even today. But there
ought to be a fortieth anniversary salute to, and republication of,
I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It
Personally, his chronicle of Ball Four‘s and its protagonist’s immediate aftermath. To those whose
discovery of
Ball Four occurred years, if not decades after the fact,
I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It
Personally may help amplify the context of both the former book itself and the controversy it
created.
Ball Four may be tame at last, considering much that has transpired around baseball, its players,
and its insiders since. But in its time, the book unnerved and outraged the actual or alleged
keepers of baseball’s image and legacy. If you were there, merely discussing the book was itself
as exaggerated as the reactions it provoked even among those who loved or at least tolerated it.
Among those who despised the book, of course, there could be no discussion, there could only
be perverse games of can you top this outrage with yours.
If you want to get the idea in edited form, you could do worse than accept Bouton’s invitation,
opening
I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally‘s dedication, to revisit one of the signature exercises
in
Ball Four opprobrium:
I feel sorry for Jim Bouton. He is 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 dow in their time of deepest rejection and write. They write, oh hell, everybody
stinks, everybody but me, and it makes them feel much better.
That came from a column by once-legendary sportswriter Dick Young, in the
New York Daily News.
Young was accused often enough in his own heyday of writing
oh hell, everybody stinks, everybody
but me, and thus making himself feel much better. But those remarks may have exposed his never
really having read
Ball Four above and beyond extracts or excerpts. It wasn’t impossible that the real
contention for Young, once an iconoclastic reporter himself, was that Bouton had done from the inside
what Young might have believed was a “legitimate” sportswriter’s job.
Bouton bumped into Young the day after that column appeared, in the Shea Stadium visitors’
clubhouse, while the Astros prepared for a game against the New York Mets. “Hi, Jim,” Young
hailed Bouton, apparently cheerfully. “Hi, Dick,” Bouton replied. “I didn’t know you were talking
to social lepers these days.” The usually pugnacious Young, Bouton observed, managed a “tight
little smile” through his “drawn, nervous look,” and replied, “Well, I’m glad you didn’t take it
personally.”
Bouton believed (and wrote) then, and probably still believes today, that Young and other
sportswriters’ overreaction to
Ball Four helped make it a best-seller in the first place. He may
not have been wrong, then or now. (Is
I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally the only book
ever written primarily about the reception afforded its author’s previous and first book?)
During one rough outing against the Cincinnati Reds, Bouton heard such catcalls as, “Shakespeare,
you no-good rat fink. Put that in your bleeping book.” At the time, he didn’t attribute that specific
remark to a specific player. But in
Ball Four’s ten-year anniversary edition (
Ball Four Plus Ball Five,
1980), he credited Pete Rose with hollering, “Bleep you Shakespeare!” (We’ve learned long since
about Pete Rose’s veracity, not to mention the cleanliness of his baseball life.)
The uproar among critics in the sporting press seemed to get half the credit for making
Ball Four a best-seller. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn probably got the other half. He actually and foolishly tried
to suppress
Ball Four. That earned its own chapter in
I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally. Kuhn
tried to strong-arm Bouton into signing a formal statement saying he hadn’t said or written any
of the book, that it was all the doing of his editor, Leonard Shecter. (Shecter’s name had been a
contentious one ever since he was one of the original Chipmunks, sportswriters who fleshed out
heroes with heavies in cheerfully irreverent tone, while seeking the men behind the games.)
Never mind that Kuhn had only read the
Look excerpts. After a little wrangling with Marvin Miller,
the players association’s executive director, Kuhn went on television merely to say everyone’s
entitled to make a mistake, without daring to suggest his real problem may have been Bouton
refusing to admit that
Ball Four was one such mistake. But even Kuhn merely tried to marginalise
Ball Four. Not even Bouton’s staunchest allies, and he had more than many might remember,
accused Kuhn of trying to burn it.
The San Diego Padres thought of that. Before the Astros and the Padres squared off for a game,
the Astros were surprised to see a burned copy of
Ball Four, left in a special binder, at the edge
of their dugout. Dick Young called Jim Bouton a social leper for writing
Ball Four, but nobody called
the Padres brownshirts or accused them of sneaking Joseph Goebbels into the manager’s seat.
And Kuhn, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, never saw fit (assuming he actually knew of the
incident) to investigate it.
Ball Four‘s greatest controversy, ahead of even the sexual escapades it actually or allegedly exposed,
proved to be Bouton’s comments about Mickey Mantle, his Yankee teammate. Bouton summed it up
neatly in the followup:
What I said about Mantle was that I enjoyed his boyish charm, his country sense of
humour, the warmth he exhibited to his teammates. I also said I didn’t like it when
I saw him brush aside young autograph-seekers and be nasty to newspapermen.
And I suggested that he might have had an even more spectacular career if he slept
more and loosened up with the boys at the bar less. You’d think I had desecrated
the flag, knocked motherhood, and attacked Spiro T. Agnew with an unabridged
dictionary.
. . . I didn’t set out to destroy heroes. Anyway, it all depends on what your idea of a
hero is. Why can’t Mickey Mantle be a hero who has a bit too much to drink from time
to time and cries into his glass that he will soon be dead, like his father and his uncle?
Why do our heroes have to be so perfect and unflawed? In other parts of the world
heroes can be drinkers or even wenchers and this only adds to their heroism.
Bouton was vindicated sadly enough when Mantle, undergoing alcohol rehab at long enough last
before battling liver cancer, spoke publicly and poignantly about his failures and the fears that
fueled them. (
This is a role model: Don’t be like me.) It made Mantle a hero all over again, for
the most part, the golden god of America’s youth now confessing his clay feet. For having written
of Mantle’s flaws and foibles contemporarily, in an era when sportswriting still hadn’t escaped
hagiography entirely and perceptions included only superstars being “entitled,” mind you, to
write such from-the-inside tales (Bouton, in
Ball Four Plus Ball Five: “If Mickey Mantle had
written
Ball Four, nobody would have blinked”), Bouton became a social leper.
Best-seller though it was, the years since have convinced me that nobody reading
I’m Glad You
Didn’t Take it Personally remembered the near-final word Bouton had about Mantle:
In many ways, he’s had a difficult time of it. He was a moody guy and I
suppose he was in pain a lot. I guess he was scared a lot, too, about people
taking him and being dishonest with him. He had a lot of financial disasters
and seemed to have a knack for trusting the wrong people (and mistrusting
people he would have been better off trusting). But I’m not sure it’s necessary
to make excuses for him. On reflection, I suppose what I’ll probably remember
most about him is his sense of humour—even about [Ball Four]. The only
thing he ever said when asked what he thought of Jim Bouton’s epic was,
“Jim who?”
Not quite. In due course, by way of a message left on Bouton’s answering machine, the dying
Mantle—answering a condolence Bouton left after the death of one of Mantle’s sons—said he never
got the Yankees to keep Bouton from Old-Timer’s Days, or threatened not to attend them himself
if Bouton was attending, something Bouton had suspected for a long enough time.
Touchingly, too, Bouton admitted how moved he was to get a positive review from Roger Angell,
baseball’s Homer, in
The New Yorker. “You have to read his too-infrequent pieces on baseball to
realise the depth of his love for the game of baseball,” Bouton wrote in
I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It
Personally. “Angell knows the game, understands it, recognises the nuances, even likes the people
in it, most of them anyway. And there I was, the Great Destroyer of the game. If I really was, Angell
would have hated me.”
“What he has given us . . . is a rare view of a highly complex public profession seen from the innermost
side,” Angell had written, “along with an ironic and courageous mind. And, very likely, the funniest
book of the year.”
By the time
I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally was published, Bouton’s pitching career had ended on
an Astros’ farm team. After a few years with WABC, where his iconoclasm was either loved or hated,
Bouton tried a brief baseball comeback, climaxing with a surprising September 1978 callup to the Atlanta
Braves, where he made a surprising start or three. (In one, the junkballing Bouton dueled impressively
with the human torch named J.R. Richard.) He then retired to a life of earnings from his co-invention of
Big League Chew, motivational speaking, a little semipro pitching, occasional writing (three subsequent
epilogues to
Ball Four; a novel, with Eliot Asinof; a chronicle of his participation in a bid to save a vintage,
wooden-grandstand ballpark in New England), a little championship ballroom dancing (with his second
wife as his partner), and the creation and oversight (Mrs. Bouton was its commissioner at one point) of
the Vintage Base Ball Federation, a league playing by 19th century rules.
In the wake of his daughter Laurie’s death in a grisly road accident, and a surprise Father’s Day missive
on the matter
from his oldest son in The New York Times, Bouton’s relationship to the Yankees was
restored. Both Bouton and Yogi Berra (boycotting the team since his arbitrary managerial firing by George
Steinbrenner) were reconciled (Michael Bouton had called for Berra’s in hand with his father’s) to the club
for Old-Timer’s Day 1998; both have since made Old-Timer’s Days a semi-habit. Bouton today is a
comfortable if much-bruised 72.
It took me decades to read
I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally. A few years ago, I found my copy, in
paperback, in a used book store in southern California. (To my surprise, when I took it home and opened
it, the inside front cover bore Bouton’s autograph.) I hope he doesn’t take it personally.
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This year, Jim Bouton went public with the diagnosis he received that he has cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a
neurological condition linked to dementia, which may have begun with a small stroke he suffered in 2012---
on the anniversary of his daughter's death. It has robbed Bouton of some of his cognitive faculties; he had to
re-learn to read, write, speak, and understand; his wife---whose own career included working with brain-
damaged children---reminds him daily.
The blessing is there’s no physical pain. 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.---Paula Kurman, Ph.D., Bouton's wife. (They met circa 1977-78, when Bouton's first marriage
collapsed and Bouton was making his comeback in the Braves' system.)
I wrote about Bouton's new struggle this past July. I was delighted to get this note from his one-time
Yankee teammate, pitcher Fritz Peterson:
Jim took me in in spring training in 1966 and believed
I had a shot at making the Yankees that year. He was right and helped me immensely! If anyone
can come back from something, Jim can.I hope to God Peterson is right.
