What is the Greatest Sports Book of All Time?
Someone asked, “ What’s the greatest sports book of all time?” on Quora. Here is my reply. You can purchase Ball Four here.
Ball Four by Jim Bouton is one of the best I’ve ever read. It reads more like a personal journal than a book, making for a fascinating read. When I was in middle school, back in 1997–1998, Sport Magazine published a list of the ten greatest sports books of all time, and Ball Four was one of them. I tracked down a copy at a now defunct local used book store and tore through it soon after buying it.
While much of what Bouton writes about won’t be shocking to modern readers, it was in 1970. The book and Bouton both received a tidal wave of negative backlash at the time of its release. Former baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn thought the book was detrimental to baseball and tried to get Bouton to sign a form stating that the book was fictional. Many established sportswriters also hated the book and seemed to resent Bouton, a rookie writer, for writing such a successful book. Famous sportswriter Dick Young said this of the book after publication.
“I feel sorry for Jim Bouton. He is a social leper. He didn’t catch it, he developed it. His collaborator on the book, Leonard Shecter, is a social leper. People like this, embittered people, sit down in their time of deepest rejection and write. They write, oh hell, everybody stinks, everybody but me, and it makes them feel much better.”
Bouton wrote about players looking up women’s skirts while sitting in the dugout. He wrote about Mickey Mantle playing hungover. He wrote about in-fighting that happened in the clubhouse, player vs. player and player vs. manager. You can tell by his stories that he has a fiery personality and he is an opinionated guy. This makes for some great interactions with the cast of characters in the book.
Another element of the book that makes it so special is that much of it takes place while Bouton is playing for the Seattle Pilots, a team that lasted only one year. The team was composed of players who had come from every other team in the league and were at various stages in their careers. The interesting backgrounds and personalities of the players add much to Bouton’s book. In the article “Ball Four Changed Sports and Books”, Bouton does a great job of explaining how the unique experience of playing for the Pilots, a team most baseball fans don’t remember, makes the book unique. He says of the Pilots:
“It’s a Major League Baseball team that, in many respects, exists only within the pages of a book. It’s like a fictional baseball team, so the characters in the book have almost become like fictional characters.”
Before Ball Four, baseball still had a public image of innocence and star players were heroes. People weren’t interested in learning about their favorite player’s drinking habits or history of infidelity. Though the morality of a book like Ball Four remains open to debate, Bouton peeled back the curtain of secrecy and gave readers an insider’s look at the inappropriate jokes, heavy drinking, and womanizing that went on in and out of the locker room. He changed the way professional athletes were perceived. I haven’t read the book cover to cover in many years, but I still read sections and passages from time to time. It holds up well and I can’t recommend it enough.
I am a director of academic support/special education teacher and writer. I love writing about/interviewing people about books, movies, music, records, and samplers.
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