Everyone in Major League Baseball considered him a pariah – persona non grata. Baseball Commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, deemed him “detrimental to baseball” and tried to get him to say his book was fiction, which Bouton refused to do. His Yankee teammates were Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Clete Boyer, Joe Pepitone… This was the Yankee dynasty! Needless to say, when he wrote the first “tell-all” book about what went on inside a major league locker room and included stories about members of the Yankee dynasty, his baseball life was over. In 1963 he won 21 games and made the All-Star Team. Jim Bouton broke the cardinal rule of the locker room: “WHAT YOU SEE HERE WHAT YOU SAY HERE STAYS HERE.” Bouton played for the New York Yankees from 1962 to 1968. Heck, maybe someday I could even meet Bouton! I was shocked! I couldn’t put it down! These major league ball players were just ordinary guys – some good, some bad and a whole lotta crazy! That’s when I first realized that I could be one of those guys.

I needed something to read on our team’s long bus trips across the treeless landscape of West Texas, so I snagged my mom’s copy of Ball Four. It was 1971, I had just made the varsity baseball team for Lee High School in Midland, Texas. Professional ball players were like gods – you collected their baseball cards, you watched them on TV, and their pictures were on your cereal box! That all changed my junior year of high school. I was a skinny kid that could throw hard, so I became a pitcher.Īs a kid, I never dreamed of playing professional baseball. In fact, I wasn’t even a very good Little League batter. The only professional instruction I ever received was when my dad gave me Stan the Man’s Hit Record – Stan Musial’s instructional record “To Help You Be A Big League Batter.” I must’ve listened to that record a thousand times, but Stan the Man’s instructions didn’t help me become a Big League batter. No professional hitting or pitching coaches. My baseball uniform consisted of a YMCA tee shirt, a pair of blue jeans and a ball cap. My dad was the coach for all but one of those teams.

I played on teams organized by the YMCA from third grade through eighth grade. I loved playing baseball when I was a kid. “ You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end, it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.

Jim bouton's ball four