Thirty years ago next month, baseball belatedly entered the modern age with the publication of Jim Bouton’s Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues. Like many milestones, Ball Four didn’t cause change so much as it signaled it–in society and in sports. Rereading the book this spring to see if it endured as a classic, I was less surprised at how well it stood up than I was at how almost quaint and innocent this once infamously outrageous work–a tell-all diary of the 1969 season, edited by sportswriter Leonard Shecter–now seemed.
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My guess is that in some ways much has changed for baseball players since Ball Four was published, and in other ways hardly anything has. Their economic standing has certainly improved, to say the least. The book opens with Bouton–a former pitching standout and World Series hero with the New York Yankees who’d fallen on hard times after suffering a sore arm–almost boasting about how he weaseled a salary of $22,000 out of the expansion Seattle Pilots. He joins the 1969 work stoppage during spring training as Marvin Miller begins flexing the muscles of the players’ union, but he hardly does so on principle, citing family matters as his excuse for failing to report on time. (Even so, he documents the principled stand of Lou Piniella, who risked his goodwill with the Pilots when he honored the strike and was soon traded to the Kansas City Royals, where he won the rookie of the year award; funny how names familiar even today jump out of the book here and there.) Later there’s what now seems a truly comical scene as the players discuss the minimum salary at a team meeting.
Today, of course, the minimum salary is $200,000 and the average salary over $1 million. Even so, I think certain aspects of a player’s life aren’t much different. The locker room remains a bawdy male bastion, and while it’s hard to imagine today’s millionaire players capering across a hotel roof on a night of “beaver shooting” (i.e., behaving as Peeping Toms, which was one of the most offensive revelations about big leaguers when the book was first published), no doubt many of the other sexual escapades described in Ball Four are still practiced. While I would hope that the situation of unconventional players like Bouton, Mike Marshall, and Steve Hovley is better today, I’m not sure that intellectual athletes aren’t still considered freaks by their more instinctive colleagues.
Smith devoted himself to New York baseball because that’s where he worked and that’s where the Yankees, Giants, and Brooklyn Dodgers were dominating the game in the 40s and 50s, but he brought his piercing eye to Chicago now and then. A 1952 column on the Cubs puts its finger on what continues to be their key genetic flaw when Smith quotes someone saying, “They faint at the sight of blood.” He writes of the “pear-shaped tones of Jack Brickhouse” (a lovely mix of the visual with the aural), and “Dearborn Massacre,” his dispatch on the White Sox’ loss in the final game of the 1959 World Series, is erudite, eloquent, and definitive.
