'So many writers owe Jim so much, because his book let us know that baseball players are a lot more interesting than Mel Allen would have us believe. ' Ball Four absolutely changed sportswriting,' says the sports journalist and historian Peter Golenbock, author of such classic baseball books as Dynasty: The New York Yankees 1949-1964, The Bronx Zoo (written with Sparky Lyle) and Wild, High and Tight: The Life and Death of Billy Martin. Some opposing players burned copies of Ball Four while Bouton was pitching against them Bouton himself would later vividly recall noted literary critic Pete Rose yelling 'Fuck you, Shakespeare!' at him from the Reds' dugout.įor all of the controversy that surrounded it, Ball Four triggered a seismic shift in the way that baseball (and all other sports) would subsequently be written about by journalists and historians, as well as by the athletes themselves. Though many of the hijinks recounted in Ball Four now seem rather tame, Bouton's book flouted the clubhouse omerta so egregiously that baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn and numerous players, managers and even baseball writers felt compelled to publicly condemn the book at the time-many without even bothering to read it.

Read More: Sex, Drugs, Nails: Talking To Lenny Dykstra About His Wild, Reckless Ride Through Life

The book is a classic, in large part because of how rudely it dealt with baseball's sentimentality about itself.

The series was based upon the controversial (and bestselling) 1970 memoir by Yankees/Pilots/Astros pitcher Jim Bouton, which caused a massive stir with its true and expletive-enhanced tales of its skirt-chasing, amphetamine-popping ballplayers, and soul-crushing contract negotiations-accounts that gave the public new (and not necessarily welcome) insight into the lives of their diamond heroes. Perhaps the most instructive example of the difficulty of adequately translating baseball into a TV series is Ball Four, which first hit the small screen on September 22, 1976, four decades to the day before Pitch's debut.

Ball four bouton