Ball Four

Release Date:- 2012-03-20

Reviews Counts:- 114

User Average Rating:- 4

Availability:- In Stock

Kind:- ebook

$11.99

The 50th Anniversary edition of ā€œthe book that changed baseballā€ (NPR), chosen by Time magazine as one of the ā€œ100 Greatest Non-Fictionā€ books.
 
When Ball Four was published in 1970, it created a firestorm. Bouton was called a Judas, a Benedict Arnold, and a ā€œsocial leperā€ for having violated the ā€œsanctity of the clubhouse.ā€ Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force Bouton to sign a statement saying the book wasnā€™t true. Ballplayers, most of whom hadnā€™t read it, denounced the book. It was even banned by a few libraries.
 
Almost everyone else, however, loved Ball Four. Fans liked discovering that athletes were real peopleā€”often wildly funny people. David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting on Vietnam, wrote a piece in Harperā€™s that said of Bouton: ā€œHe has written . . . a book deep in the American vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book.ā€
 
Today Ball Four has taken on another roleā€”as a time capsule of life in the sixties. ā€œIt is not just a diary of Boutonā€™s 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros,ā€ says sportswriter Jim Caple. ā€œItā€™s a vibrant, funny, telling history of an era that seems even further away than four decades. To call it simply a ā€˜tell all bookā€™ is like describing The Grapes of Wrath as a book about harvesting peaches in California.ā€
  Includes a new foreword by Jim Bouton's wife, Paula Kurman  
ā€œAn irreverent, best-selling book that angered baseballā€™s hierarchy and changed the way journalists and fans viewed the sports world.ā€ ā€”The Washington Post

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