Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues

The 50th Anniversary edition of "the book that changed baseball" (NPR), chosen by Time magazine as one of the "100 Greatest Non-Fiction" books.

When Ball Four was published in 1970, it created a firestorm. Bouton was called a Judas, a Benedict Arnold, and a "social leper" for having violated the "sanctity of the clubhouse." Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force Bouton to sign a statement saying the book wasn't true. Ballplayers, most of whom hadn't read it, denounced the book. It was even banned by a few libraries.

Almost everyone else, however, loved Ball Four. Fans liked discovering that athletes were real people—often wildly funny people. David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting on Vietnam, wrote a piece in Harper's that said of Bouton: "He has written . . . a book deep in the American vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book."

Today Ball Four has taken on another role—as a time capsule of life in the sixties. "It is not just a diary of Bouton's 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros," says sportswriter Jim Caple. "It's a vibrant, funny, telling history of an era that seems even further away than four decades. To call it simply a 'tell all book' is like describing The Grapes of Wrath as a book about harvesting peaches in California."

Includes a new foreword by Jim Bouton's wife, Paula Kurman

"An irreverent, best-selling book that angered baseball's hierarchy and changed the way journalists and fans viewed the sports world." —The Washington Post

© 2012 RosettaBooks (Ebook): 9780795323249

Release date

Ebook: 20 March 2012