I’d call Shecter and say, ‘Is this interesting?’ And he’d say: ‘Are you kidding? Keep going!’ “īaseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn publicly rebuked Bouton, demanding that he renounce the book as fiction.

Every once in a while, I would transfer the notes to audio and send in my tapes. “I didn’t know the value of it,” Bouton told The New York Times in 2017. In 1969, while pitching for the expansion Seattle Pilots and the Houston Astros, he began the process of chronicling conversations he’d had and scenes he had witnessed.Įxcerpts were initially released in Look magazine, generating fierce reactions from players, management and other sportswriters who vilified Bouton and Shecter for rendering an honest account of behavior that went on beyond the baseball diamond.īy detailing amphetamines use, alcoholism and sexual hijinks on the Yankees and other teams, Ball Four represented the first attempt to pull back the curtain on the seamy side of professional sports.

Louis Cardinals.Bouton was nearing the end of his major-league career when sportswriter Leonard Shecter convinced him to start a season-long diary on life in the big leagues. The Yankees lost the World Series both years, with Bouton losing his lone start in 1963 in New York's loss to the Angeles Dodgers, and winning twice the following year in the Yankees' loss to the St. Throwing so hard that his cap flew off his head, Bouton was 21-8 with six shutouts in 1963 - his second season in the majors - and went 18-13 with four more shutouts in 1964. Bouton's revealing look at baseball off the field made for eye-opening and entertaining reading, but he paid a big price for the best-seller when former teammates, other players and executives across the big leagues ostracized him for exposing their secrets. Published in 1970, 'Ball Four' detailed Yankees great Mickey Mantle's carousing, and the use of stimulants in the major leagues. He fought a brain disease linked to dementia and was in hospice care. He was 80.īouton's family said he died Wednesday at the Great Barrington, Massachusetts, home he shared with wife Paula Kurman.

Jim Bouton, the former New York Yankees pitcher who shocked and angered the conservative baseball world with the tell-all book 'Ball Four,' has died.

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