Ball Four

The book is more than 30 years old now, but it`s still dangerous: If you pick up Jim Bouton`s "Ball Four" and open it at random, a good part of your day is shot. You`ll spend the next few hours reading about and laughing at things you`ve read about and laughed at a dozen times over the years.

"Ball Four" fans like to talk about the book, remind each other of great moments, classic scenes, unforgettable characters. Offhand, I can think of only one other book - Joseph Heller`s "Catch-22" - that so successfully transforms reading from a personal to a communal experience. In a gesture that seemed at first bold, then wise, and finally inevitable, the New York Public Library named "Ball Four" one of the 100 Books of the Century.

Late last year, Sports Publishing Inc. came out with the latest edition: "Ball Four: The Final Pitch" (516 pages, $24.95), with Bouton`s previous epilogues, "Ball Five" (10 years later) and "Ball Six" (20 years later) now joined by "Ball Seven" (30 years later).

For months, the book sat under my desk. But baseball season has started up, and besides, there`s that new epilogue to check out, see what Bouton`s up to these days ...

And there went the afternoon. Bouton owes me a lot of time.

For those not in the know, "Ball Four" was pitcher Jim Bouton`s chronicle of the 1969 baseball season as experienced by a new expansion team, the Seattle Pilots. (They would move to Milwaukee the next year to become the Brewers.) Bouton was a former flamethrowing New York Yankee, become a semi-dead-armed knuckleballer trying to hang on in the Big Leagues. Throughout the season he took notes, and over the winter he and editor Leonard Shecter fashioned his jottings into a book. It hit the best-seller lists. Everything else hit the fan.

Bouton, it seems, had been honest. He had told tales out of school. He had let people know what ballplayers are really like, what really goes on in the clubhouse. Although many of his tales were uproariously funny, and humanized the previously godlike figures, Bouton also revealed how cheap and petty the owners were (then, anyway), and how downright stupid many of them were (some things never change). He also revealed a lot of what we should have already known - that most ballplayers were, at heart and in other vital organs, just overgrown kids. (Bouton re-immortalized the already immortal Mickey Mantle by describing in giddy detail The Mick`s leading his teammates on Peeping-Tom expeditions.)

Mostly, though, it was a warm and heartfelt memoir about a maybe-over-the-hill ballplayer struggling to stay in the game he deeply loved. Though it`s quite tame by contemporary standards, at the time, it caused an uproar; baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn seemed to think he had the power to force Bouton to withdraw the book, and was galled to discover he didn`t. But this 30-year-old baseball book, concerned mainly with ordinary (and ordinarily forgettable) ballplayers, remains extraordinarily appealing and deeply touching. Bouton and Shecter tapped into something deeply human, something far beyond baseball.

And it`s about as funny a book as you`ll ever read. (Two words: Joe Schultz.)

BOOKS, ETC.

The first five novels in Jan Karon`s series on the charming, warm-hearted town of Mitford are now available as "The Mitford Years" (Penguin). "At Home in Mitford," "A Light in the Window," "These High, Green Hills" and "A New Song" are also available individually.

On the edgier end of the publishing universe, Taschen introduces its Icons series, featuring high-quality art distilled into a small, affordable ($9.99) format. The first set ranges from "Chairs" by Charlotte and Peter Fiell to "Erotica 19th Century" by Gilles Neret, from Edward S. Curtis` "Native Americans" to Serge Jacques` rankly explicit "Paris-Hollywood." New York Mayor Ralph Giuliani would not approve, but then, who asked him?

(c) Copley News Service

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Author: Arthur Salm