About this item
From the day he first stepped into the Yankee clubhouse, Jim Bouton (19392019) was the sports worlds deceptive revolutionary. Underneath the crew cut and behind the all-American boy-next-door good looks lurked a maverick with a signature style. Whether it was his frank talk about player salaries and mistreatment by management, his passionate advocacy of progressive politics, or his efforts to convince the United States to boycott the 1968 Olympics, Bouton confronted the conservative sports world and compelled it to catch up with a rapidly changing American society. Bouton defied tremendous odds to make the majors, won two games for the Yankees in the 1964 World Series, and staged an improbable comeback with the Braves as a thirty-nine-year-old. But it was his fateful 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and his resulting insiders account, Ball Four, that did nothing less than reintroduce America to its national pastime in a lasting, profound way. In Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original, Mitchell Nathanson gives readers a look at Boutons remarkable life. He tells the unlikely story of how Boutons Ball Four, perhaps the greatest baseball book of all time, came into being, how it was received, and how it forever changed the way we view not only sports books but professional sports as a whole. Based on wide-ranging interviews Nathanson conducted with Bouton, family, friends, and others, he provides an intimate, inside account of Boutons life. Nathanson provides insight as to why Bouton saw the world the way he did, why he was so different than the thousands of players who came before him, and how, in the cliquey, cold, bottomline world of professional baseball, Bouton managed to be both an insider and an outsider all at once.
About the Author
Mitch Nathanson is the author of the first and only comprehensive biography of the mysterious slugger Dick Allen. In GOD ALMIGHTY HISSELF: The Life and Legacy of Dick Allen, he revealed in full the man behind the myth. In his latest baseball biography, BOUTON: The Life of a Baseball Original, Nathanson tells the remarkable story of Jim Bouton, the journeyman Yankee who found himself in Nowheresville, USA in 1969, otherwise known as the clubhouse of the expansion Seattle Pilots. Bouton found gold in the Upper Northwest, producing the greatest sports book of all time: BALL FOUR. BOUTON not only shows not only how he did it but digs deeper and explores the life of a man who won all of 62 games but who changed professional sports in ways 300-game winners never could. To which Bouton's Seattle Pilot teammate, Jim Gosger, would most likely say, "Yeah surrre."
