Ball Four

"That’s exactly what it is. It’s a diary of a season. Jim Bouton was a wildly successful young player for the Yankees and then basically lost his arm, he got hurt. The book is about his attempt to come back. What makes it wonderful reading, and the reason I love it, is that it’s beautifully written and, again, there’s a great deal of humanity in it. There is certainly also a lot of shock-value in it. There are stories about athletes taking drugs and some of the off-field relationships. That is what made the book somewhat scandalous when it first came out. Yes, there is quite a lot of that in there. But Jim is a wonderful writer and the book really turns out to be the story of somebody trying desperately to hold onto his youth, trying desperately to hold onto his talent. There’s the famous last line of the book: “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.” There’s a depth to the writing, and to the story. Again, the great American baseball story is the story of the player at the end. There’s the wonderful youth when they’re a dominant player, but how will it be when you can no longer throw at 95 miles an hour, when you can no longer hit 40 home runs? How are you going to handle that? From a player’s perspective, I think this is almost unquestionably the best-written book on that. There are other books like it, and some are very, very good, but this is the one that captures it best. In a vague way he does, and he actually tries another comeback, which he added to the book later. He doesn’t, of course, come all the way back – he never does recapture his youth. I don’t want to ruin it for anyone. It’s about the struggle. It’s a very funny book."