Pitching Deep and Inside

* SPORTS
* APRIL 7, 2010

By ALLEN BARRA

Some baseball players change the game with a bat, a ball or a glove. James Alan Bouton changed it with a pen and a few hundred scraps of notebook paper that he kept in his back pocket while pitching for the one and only season of the Seattle Pilots in 1969.

When edited by sportswriter Leonard Shecter, they came together as "Ball Four," one of the best-selling and most influential sports books ever written. Amazingly, 40 years after its publication it remains one of the most controversial.

"I still have every scrap of paper I wrote on," says Mr. Bouton, age 71. Considering their impact, they should be in a glass case in Cooperstown. "I'm not holding my breath waiting for that phone call," Mr. Bouton says with a laugh. "Bowie Kuhn, who was the commissioner of baseball at the time, summoned me to his office to sign a letter stating that most of 'Ball Four' was fiction. I made it very clear to him that it was most certainly not fiction and I had no intention of saying that it was. The funny thing is that Bowie was living in such a dream world that I think he thought most of it was fiction." Denied a statement from the author, Kuhn issued an official statement that "Ball Four" was "detrimental to baseball."

No one, let alone a ballplayer, had ever before written about the joys, sorrows and sometimes boredom of big-league baseball. Certainly no one before Mr. Bouton had revealed the inner workings of the game and exposed the everyday behavior of some of its players—the frustrations, depressions, infidelities, alcoholism and drug use (particularly "greenies," or pep pills)—with such honesty and humor.

Mr. Bouton had broken into the big leagues in 1962 as a high-kicking power pitcher with the New York Yankees, winning 39 games in the 1963 and '64 seasons and two more in the 1964 World Series. The following year he hurt his arm and lost his fastball; after struggling through four more seasons in New York, he made a comeback as a knuckle-ball pitcher with the expansion Pilots, today's Milwaukee Brewers.

"Ball Four" was filled with revelations about his Seattle teammates, most of them marginal players, and also about the Yankee stars of the pennant-winning years, particularly America's idol, Mickey Mantle. "I wrote some about Mickey's drinking and carousing," says Mr. Bouton, "things that everyone in baseball knew about but that were never discussed in public. The funny thing is that most of what I said about Mickey was mild compared to what he and Whitey Ford and other players later admitted in their own books. If I had a hand in opening up discussion of what a professional athlete's life is really like, I'm proud of that.

"Really, what I felt I did was capture lightning in a bottle. Most of those guys, like my old Seattle manager Joe Schultz, were great talkers, great storytellers. I thought I made them more accessible, more human to fans."

Most of what Mr. Bouton wrote about Mantle was reverential—"He was one of my idols"—but for years it was rumored that Mantle was angry at Mr. Bouton, though Mickey himself denied it. In 1994, a year before Mantle died, Mickey's son Billy died of cancer. Mr. Bouton sent the family a note of condolence, to which Mickey responded with a lengthy phone message. "I was never really hurt by your book," he said. "I think that's been exaggerated a lot....Anyway, thanks for the letter, and everything's fine with me. Thanks a lot, bud." Did Mr. Bouton save the tape? "I sure did. I'm saving it for my grandchildren."

A Sports Illustrated poll in 2002 placed "Ball Four" third among "The Top 100 Sports Books of All Time," finishing behind only A.J. Liebling's "The Sweet Science" and Roger Kahn's "The Boys of Summer." In 1995, the book's 25th anniversary, "Ball Four" was the only sports book to be selected by the New York Public Library for its "Books of the Century" exhibit.

"Ball Four" changed the way succeeding generations looked at baseball. It also changed Mr. Bouton. For many ballplayers, life after the game can be limbo, but for Mr. Bouton it was a renaissance. He wrote or edited four other books, including a novel, "Strike Zone" (1994), co-written with Eliot Asinof of "Eight Men Out" fame, and "Foul Ball" (2003), a heartfelt account of his battle to save Wahconah Park, a historic minor league field in Pittsfield, Mass., from destruction. (He succeeded.)

Meanwhile, he started a company that makes shredded chewing gum as an alternative to chewing tobacco, and another that makes personalized baseball cards. He was (and still is) in demand on the lecture circuit for college and Fortune 500 companies.

In the early 1970s, Mr. Bouton was a sportscaster for CBS. In 1972, while at his office in Manhattan, a receptionist came to tell him that a young actor wanted to talk to him. "Into my office walks a very young, thin, good-looking guy in a short-sleeved plaid shirt. He asked me how he should go about learning how to play a ballplayer from the South. I told him to contact the president of the Southern League and spend a couple of weeks down there, riding a bus and learning to spit tobacco juice. That young man grew up to be Robert De Niro, and the movie was 'Bang the Drum Slowly.'"

In 1973 he played some pick-up basketball with actor Elliott Gould, who was working with director Robert Altman on a screen version of Raymond Chandler's detective classic "The Long Goodbye." Stacy Keach had been cast as private eye Philip Marlowe's sleazy pal, Terry Lennox, but became ill. Mr. Gould thought Mr. Bouton, who had taken some acting classes from Lee Strasberg, could play the part, and after a quick audition, Mr. Altman agreed. The film was not a commercial success, but it earned Mr. Bouton a nice nod from The New Yorker's Pauline Kael and quickly morphed into a cult classic. Some of the best-remembered lines in the film, Mr. Bouton told an audience at a screening of the movie last year, didn't come from Chandler's novel or even screenwriter Leigh Brackett. "I'd heard about how much Altman liked his actors to improvise, but I didn't believe it till I experienced it in person. He'd start the day by saying, 'Did you read the script?' Then, 'Good. Now forget it.'"

Outside of all that, Mr. Bouton's life hasn't been that interesting.

He is currently putting the finishing touches on "Ball Four: The Musical." He doesn't plan on playing himself in the stage version, though. "I'm too old to be a pariah again."

Mr. Barra writes about sports for the Journal.