Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics)

by Jim Bouton

  Life will never be the same without Laurie, but we do everything we can to keep her close. We have her pictures around and try to find opportunities to talk about her. She always makes an entrance in some hilarious anecdote whenever we have a party. We believe her spirit hovers near. We call on her at important times. “C’mon, Laurie help us out here,” we sometimes ask. We give her partial credit for special achievements, and full credit for good weather. And just as the loss of Laurie brings me down, her memory lifts me up. Whenever I get depressed, I hear her voice. “Now, don’t you be sittin’ all day in that chair, Dad.”

  Back in 1994, when Mickey Mantle’s son Billy died, I had sent Mickey a brief note saying how bad I felt for him. I said I had a nice memory of Billy, a polite little boy, running around the Yankee clubhouse during spring training. I also said I hoped Mickey was feeling better about Ball Four, that I had never intended to hurt him, and that I looked back on my Yankee years as a great time in my life.

  I never expected to hear back from Mickey; I just wanted him to have the note. But about two weeks later I walked into my office and my secretary was standing by the answering machine with an enigmatic smile on her face. She said there was a message I should play for myself. I punched the button.

  “Jim, this is Mickey,” said that familiar Oklahoma voice. “I just got your letter about… you know, saying you’re sorry about Billy, and I appreciate it. And I never was really hurt by your book. I think that’s been exaggerated a lot… and I sure in the hell never did tell the Yankees that if you came to an Old-Timers’ game, or something, I wasn’t going to come; I heard that was out. Anyway, thanks for the letter, and everything’s fine with me. Thanks a lot, Bud.”

  Of course, I saved the tape. I’ll leave it for my grandchildren.

  It was only after Laurie died that I fully understood why Mickey had called. It was because of the condolence note I had sent about Billy. When Laurie died, I remember how close I felt to anyone who called, or dropped a note, or stopped me on the street to express their sympathy. Especially if they had a particular memory of Laurie, a brief encounter, a story we hadn’t heard that would add something to our experience of her, and make her come alive again, if only for a moment. I was deeply grateful for any kind word or gesture.

  The death of a child changes you in profound ways. It suddenly moves you to a new level of tolerance and empathy. I take nothing for granted today. I’m no longer so quick to judge a sour face, an angry tone of voice, a slumped demeanor. Who knows what that person’s story might be? Maybe it’s worse than mine. They say it can make you a better person, but I don’t know about that. I only know if I could just have Laurie back, I’d happily return to my former, rotten self.

  In 1995, Mickey Mantle himself passed away. Nobody had been surprised to learn it was liver cancer. The surprise was that he lived as long as he did. His famous line, “If I knew I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself,” took on added poignancy. His sense of humor was there to the end, but it was his message to kids that lifted The Mick to new heights. “I’m not a role model,” he cautioned at a press conference. “Don’t do what I did.” Then Mickey endorsed the organ donor movement, thereby saving uncounted future lives thanks to the body parts that would be donated by his many fans. Talk about giving something back.

  As I watched Mickey shrivel away, twenty-six years after Ball Four talked about his drinking, I couldn’t help wondering this: If the baseball people who had called the book lies had instead tried to help Mickey, might he still be alive?

  Mickey joins Roger Maris, Elston Howard, Steve Hamilton and Dale Long among my Yankee teammates who have passed away. I don’t know if it’s just me or the fact that I’m getting older, but as time goes by I feel closer to them now than I did back then. My perspective has changed.

  I was actually ambivalent in 1998 when Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa were dueling to break Roger Maris’ home run record—his sixty-one homers in ’61 had broken Babe Ruth’s record. It was not the angry Roger of Ball Four that I was pulling for, but the small-town kid from Fargo, North Dakota who had signed out of high school, and never had help dealing with the big city media.

  Today I see Elston Howard, not as the less-than-militant fellow portrayed in the book, but as a black man who survived growing up in the ’40s and worked his way to the top of what was once a white man’s game. I think of Elston behind the plate in his catcher’s gear, hunching his big body forward and squatting low to give me a target at the knees. He’s a teammate to me now, not a token.

  So much has changed. I marvel now at our lack of sophistication back then, how naive we were, how unprepared we were for life in the big leagues. Except for the occasional college guy, invariably nicknamed “The Professor,” or in the case of Mike Marshall, “Brains,” most players had only high school educations, if that. We were raw, rough, unfinished. Sometimes it could be a problem, but mostly it was fun. When you had a teammate from Alabama or Brooklyn, for example, you got Alabama—and Brooklyn.

  With college baseball replacing the lower minor leagues as a training ground, today’s players are more homogenized, more polished. The common experience of having attended college with the mere exposure to education, if not actual learning, has rounded off the corners, blurred regional differences. Players are more savvy about how the world works. They understand that they’re more than just athletes—they’re entertainers, spokesmen, profit centers. The more successful ones are small industries unto themselves with lawyers, and agents, and accountants.

  People are always asking me about baseball today, starting with the money. “Isn’t it outrageous,” they say, “how much money these players are making?” I tell them the money we made was outrageous; that players are finally getting their share of the revenue, most of which comes from television.

  “They’re making so much money they don’t care anymore,” say people who have no clue what it takes to get to the big leagues. The most competitive players in the world—the only ones who make it—are not likely to change their natures because of money. Nobody accuses millionaire businessmen of slacking off.

  What people don’t understand is that sports is a zero-sum game. A player only does well at another player’s expense. No matter how hard they try and no matter how much you pay them, at any given time one-third of the players will be having a good year, one-third will be having an average year, and one-third will be having a bad year. It’s like putting 800 Nobel-Prize-winning nuclear physicists in a science class and grading them on a curve.

  Then people whine about ticket prices, saying they can’t afford to bring their families to the games anymore. I mention that attendance is up, that entire families have replaced what used to be mostly fathers and sons, and that salaries have no effect on ticket prices, which are based solely on what customers are willing to pay.

  Next thing out of their mouths is that some team is going to go bankrupt, in spite of the fact that the only team to ever go bankrupt in the modern history of the game was the Seattle Pilots, believe it or not, giving them yet one more distinction. And even there, nobody lost money. The franchise was purchased for $5.3 million and sold a year later for $10.8 million. That’s a $5.5 million difference, less debt service and expenses which couldn’t have been that much, considering what the Pilots saved on salaries, baseballs, and hot water in the clubhouse. The City of Seattle even got another franchise in the bargain.

  People say it’s hard to have a rooting interest today because players change teams all the time. But players moved around more in the old days. The Seattle Pilots used fifty-three players in a single season! Cleveland general manager Frank “Trader” Lane wasn’t happy if he hadn’t traded three guys before breakfast. The Yankees practically used Kansas City as a farm team. The difference is that back then trades were announced as something good. “We just traded four bums for five phenoms who are gonna help us win the pennant,” the GM would say. Today he says, “We can’t pay what this guy’
s asking, so we have to trade him.”

  The truth is, most players don’t want to change teams. They want to settle into a community, put their kids in school, make business contacts. It’s the owners who insist on keeping players on a short leash, with two- and three-year deals, and then cry foul when the players shop themselves around.

  The latest gripe is that small-market teams don’t have a chance. But when did small-market teams ever have a chance? In the ’40s and ’50s, baseball’s so-called “golden age,” most World Series involved one or two of the three New York teams. While the Yankees were winning twenty-nine pennants in forty-four years, some teams never got out of last place! The truth is, since free agency, more teams have won championships than ever before in the history of baseball.

  But people don’t want to hear the truth. They prefer their steadfast beliefs, acquired over time and developed into a mantra: “The players are overpaid, teams are losing money, and the game is about to go bankrupt.” Where do they get this nonsense? It starts with the owners who are not above trashing their own players every time a union contract comes up for renewal. This is strange marketing. Can you imagine General Motors announcing that its cars are not worth the price?

  The owners are encouraged in this effort by the media, which back them up with an unending stream of anti-player rhetoric. It’s the theme of every sports talk show in the country, the favorite rant of reporters and so-called journalists, most of whom are employed by companies in partnership with the leagues. Little thought is given to the notion of athletes as entertainers, that owners didn’t get rich in their other businesses by overpaying their employees, and that unlike failed businessmen, players don’t get stock options when they get released.

  Of course, the players don’t help themselves very much. Instead of simply saying, “We’re entitled to bargain for our services in a free market like any other citizen,” a few can always be counted on for gems like, “We’re just trying to put food on the table.” This is usually uttered by a guy wearing gold chains, climbing out of a limo. Of course, this drives the radio guys nuts, and before long, Larry from Brooklyn is calling to say that, “Conducive to what that last caller just said, I would like to remunerate that the owners should just, like, draw a line in the sand, or whatever, and show who’s boss by locking up the stadiums and let those prima donnas rot.”

  The whole exercise is so one-sided that an owner lockout is commonly referred to as a player strike. Which may explain why a nation of fans is angry at the players. At stadiums today there’s an underlying level of hostility that can be quite scary. It’s a love-hate relationship with very little patience; booing often starts in the first inning! Fans are not there to enjoy a ball game so much as watch surrogate achievers attempt to provide something that’s missing in their own lives.

  This is not how it was in the old, old days. When I was a kid my brothers and I would go to the Polo Grounds in New York and root for the Giants no matter how badly they played. Willie Mays, Whitey Lockman, Monte Irvin, and my man Sal Maglie; we loved those guys. When they lost we wanted to run down on the field and tell them not to feel bad, that we were still behind them.

  So, what’s fair between the owners and the players? Ask yourself how things would be if Major-League Baseball (or the NFL or NBA) faced competition from another league. There’d be no player draft, no six-year-service requirement, no tax on team spending, and no salary caps. And professional sports would survive—because as long as there are people who like to play and others who like to watch, businessmen will figure out how to make money from that combination. And if not these guys, then the ones waiting in the wings to buy the next available franchise at any price.

  Incidentally, if you ever wonder what life would be like without the antitrust laws, these never-ending sports labor wars give you some idea. Meanwhile, the owners and players will blame each other, and the only thing for sure is that no matter what happens, the beauty and the magic of the game will bail them out.

  How good are today’s players? The truth is, they’re better than we were. They’re bigger, stronger, and faster. They train with weights and work out year round. We were told not to lift weights because it would make us muscle-bound. We spent our off-seasons trying to earn money to support our baseball habit. On the first day of spring training, today’s players look like greyhounds. We went down there to lose weight. Yes, we were better at the little things. We could bunt, hit-and-run, move the runners, hit the cutoff man. But if we played against today’s players we’d score three or four runs doing the little things and lose 14–3.

  I know I’m going to hear it from the old guys, but I always remember what Johnny Sain used to say on Old-Timers’ Day when players from the ’40s and ’50s would tell us how much better they were. “The older they get,” John would say of his contemporaries, “the better they were when they were younger.”

  This is not to say that guys forty years ago wouldn’t be as good as today’s players if we had had the same advantages of diet, training and coaching, etc. It’s more a commentary on the general level of play. I’m saying if we walked off a field in the ’60s onto a field in 2000, we wouldn’t be as successful. Players like Koufax and Mantle would be good, but not great. Our good players would just be average. I’d probably spend two years in the big leagues instead of eight. And some guys, like Whitey Ford, wouldn’t even get a chance to play in the first place, on size alone. They’re no longer signing 5′ 9″ pitchers from high schools in the Bronx.

  This doesn’t diminish Whitey’s greatness, or the achievements of any former athletes, for that matter. You can only be great in your time. And greatness in any era is worthy of respect.

  While the quality of play has improved, it doesn’t mean the game itself is any better. The designated-hitter rule, for example, is awful. It adds offense to a game that doesn’t need it, at the expense of that wonderful moment when a manager had to choose whether to leave a good pitcher in a low-scoring game, or take him out for a pinch hitter. And I don’t like the shorter fences and all those home runs, not because I’m a pitcher but because it subordinates strategy. What’s the value of a bunt or a stolen base in a 14–12 game? Baseball has become a cheaper game, designed for unknowing fans accustomed to gross action over subtle beauty.

  It’s part of a general dumbing down of society, reflected in shock-jock radio, Jerry-Springer TV, and professional wrestling, which has become the new model for player behavior. Hype and bravado have supplanted truth and humility. Baseball has a cartoonish feel. A batter hits a long drive, pauses at home plate to admire the blast, flips his bat in the air with the flourish of a baton twirler that must be practiced in front of a mirror, and pirouettes around the bases with his arms in the air like he’s just discovered a new route to the Far East. And that’s on a foul ball!

  After a home run today, a player has to point somewhere, to his heart, to the sky, to his agent in the third row. Then there’s a curtain call in front of the dugout, insisted upon by delirious fans who don’t seem to understand that the game is not over yet. In my day, a player would hit the ball, toss his bat aside, jog around the bases, tip his cap, and sit down. A homer was just a homer—not a religious experience.

  World Series celebrations consisted of players slapping each other’s backs as they ran off the field. The only perfect game in World Series history rated a mere bear hug between the pitcher and the catcher near home plate. Today’s celebrations are staged events in the middle of the field, with the obligatory player pile. Athletes in all sports are now looking to make a statement—ride a police horse around the field, strip off some clothes—with the highlight reel and the magazine cover in mind.

  Even umpires are getting into the act with their confrontational demeanor. It’s not enough to call a hitter out on strikes today, they have to get in his face and dare him to complain. Or they’ll take off their masks and follow a guy back to the dugout, as if hoping for one more word to get him tossed. Years ago the umpires would
go out of their way to avoid confrontation. Some of the funniest scenes had umpires constantly turning their backs and walking away, while heated players or managers ran in circles to try and stay in front of them.

  The aura of spectacle, along with the booing, lends a Roman Coliseum-like feeling to ballparks today. It’s no surprise that the next escalation is the players themselves charging into the stands, as happened recently when some Los Angeles Dodgers waded into the field boxes at Wrigley Field. And why? Well, because a fan had grabbed one of their baseball hats. A hat? These guys could buy entire hat companies! At least it’s nice to see that they’re not any smarter than we were.

  And what’s the deal with all that noise at the stadiums today? As soon as you walk in, you’re blasted with music and advertising spots and silly scoreboard games. And this goes on before, during, and after the games; it’s relentless. You can’t hear yourself think. You can’t even talk to the person sitting next to you in a normal tone of voice. The quiet observation, “I think he’s going to bunt here,” loses something when screamed, “I THINK HE’S GOING TO BUNT HERE!”

  When I was a kid, walking into the Polo Grounds during batting practice was like walking into a church. A vast, strangely quiet place where you could hear the crack of a bat on a ball from the far reaches of the upper deck, like mumbled Latin echoing off vaulted ceilings. There was nothing else quite like it, and that was part of the magic. I’m sure today’s marketing geniuses have decided they’re just giving fans what they want, but I think it’s a mistake. Blurring the distinction between a real sport and a phony extravaganza can’t be good for the sport in the long run.

  At least the players are better cared for today. Pitching, for example, is now a team effort with a bullpen full of specialists with titles like “middle reliever” and “setup man” and “closer.” We had a “short man” to pitch the last inning or two, if necessary, and everybody else was a “long man,” in case the game got out of reach. Whoever was injured, struggling, or on the shit-list was a “long man.” Today they count pitches and rarely let the starter throw more than ninety. We routinely threw a hundred and twenty, or more. We pitched until we dropped. And we did it on three days’ rest, not four or five like today.