Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original

by Mitchell Nathanson

Overview

​2021 Seymour Medal Finalist 
Named a Best Baseball Book of 2020 by Sports Collectors Digest
New York Times 2020 Summer Reading List

From the day he first stepped into the Yankee clubhouse, Jim Bouton (1939–2019) was the sports world’s 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 insider’s 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 Bouton’s remarkable life. He tells the unlikely story of how Bouton’s 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 Bouton’s 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, bottom‑line world of professional baseball, Bouton managed to be both an insider and an outsider all at once.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496229854
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	04/01/2022
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	641,914
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 6.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Mitchell Nathanson is a professor of law in the Jeffrey S. Moorad Center for the Study of Sports Law at the Villanova University School of Law. He is the author of God Almighty Hisself: The Life and Legacy of Dick Allen, A People’s History of Baseball, and The Fall of the 1977 Phillies: How a Baseball Team’s Collapse Sank a City’s Spirit.
 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments    
Prologue: Publication Day    

Part One: The Bulldog
1. Warm-up Bouton    
2. Take a Hike, Son    
3. Joliet    
4. You Should Write a Book    
5. A Long Way from Amarillo    
6. Fucking Shecter    
7. All ’Bout Bouton    
8. A Threat, Not a Fine    
9. The Bulldog and the Chipmunks    
10. Rebel without a Fastball    
11. The Youth of America Is for Kids    
12. The End of the Line    

Part Two: The Author
13. Beginnings    
14. From Tell-Some to Tell-All    
15. Take Your Pants Off, Bouton    
16. Fuck You, Shakespeare    
17. Protectors of the Holy Flame    
18. Against the Unwritten Rules of Baseball    
19. Not Enough Sex    
20. The Leni Riefenstahl of the National Football League    
21. Taking It Personally    
22. Bad Stuff ’bout the Mets    

Part Three: The Iconoclast
23. Not Selling Refrigerators    
24. The Most Famous Vasectomy in New York    
25. Are We Rolling?     
26. One Smart-Ass and Four Lawyers    
27. You’re a Long Time Dead    
28. The Battered Bastard of Baseball    
29. Gilligan’s Island in Baseball Suits    
30. Too Old, Too Everything    
31. Magic    
32. Dreaming in Baseball    
33. Mask of the Bulldog    
34. Hey, New York—Bouton’s Back!    
35. Lightning in a Pouch    
36. The Solo Artist    
37. Laurie    
38. Existential Bad Faith    
39. A Mile in Bowie’s Shoes    
40. Cashing Out    
41. The Butter-Yellow Box    
Epilogue: The Cool of the Evening    
Notes    
Bibliography    
Index    

Editorial Reviews

When Mitchell Nathanson…approached Bouton about writing his biography, the pitcher gave his blessing, on one condition: that Nathanson write about him with the honesty he'd tried to bring to the game of baseball. In Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original, Nathanson has mostly obliged, delivering a frank if manifestly fond account of a remarkable American life.

The New York Times Book Review - John Swansburg

Once you start reading, you will not be able to stop. A compelling look at one of the most influential and controversial figures in baseball history. A new generation needs to know the story of Jim Bouton: a man who never wearied of gleefully and hilariously skewering the establishment but who also had the old-school drive to will his dreams into reality. Above all, a lifetime love of baseball shines through in every chapter—a true reflection of Bouton himself.”—Brian Kenny, host for MLB Network and author of Ahead of the Curve: Inside the Baseball Revolution

From the Publisher

"Bouton is a book that deserves space next to Ball Four on the bookshelf. Nathanson has done a thorough job of presenting the life of a complex man who changed the game of baseball, not by what he did on the field, but what he observed on the field, in the clubhouse and on the road."—Bob D'Angelo, Sports Bookie

Sports Bookie - Bob D'Angelo

"Nathanson's source list is deep and insightful and his writing is crisp. And his access to Bouton's Ball Four notes provides answers to some lingering questions."—Dennis Star, Peoria Journal Star

Peoria Journal Star - Dennis Star

"Nathanson . . . an astute writer on the game, is at his best on the Bouton-Shecter collaboration—late nights at the Lion’s Head Bar in Greenwich Village; Shecter making sense of Bouton’s scrawls on stationery, envelopes and toilet paper; the pair noodling over the manuscript stripped down to their underwear in Shecter’s airless Chelsea apartment. . . . Nathanson is good, too, with Bouton wisecracks."—Maxwell Carter, Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal - Maxwell Carter

"Nathanson goes beyond tracing Bouton’s life, focusing instead on explicating the roots of Ball Four. In so doing, the book becomes an inside-publishing exposé, showing how the publication and selling of Ball Four changed our expectations of what a sports book could be. . . . In addition, the book provides fascinating details about Bouton's post–Ball Four life, including his fling at acting and his turn as an entrepreneur, developing the successful bubble-gum product Big League Chew. A welcome look at one of baseball's signature mavericks."—Mark Levine, Booklist

Booklist - Mark Levine

"A well-researched and fascinating read that tells how the free thinking Bouton always marched to the beat of his own drummer."—John Werner, Waco Tribune-Herald

Waco Tribune-Herald - John Werner

“Half a century after Jim Bouton’s Ball Four hilariously let the air out of Major League Baseball’s inflated self-image, one of the game’s most fascinating characters finally gets the biography he deserves. Unfettered and unfiltered, like Bouton himself, Bouton will make you laugh, make you cry, and make you wanna pound that Budweiser. To paraphrase the late, great Joe Schultz, ‘Attaway to go, Mitchell Nathanson!’”—Dan Epstein, author of Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride through Baseball and America in the Swinging ’70s

Dan Epstein

“For years people have told me that they fell in love with baseball after reading Ball Four. Jim Bouton was a unique character on the baseball stage, a figure of historical importance. It’s time we all knew him better, and Mitchell Nathanson’s book gets that done.”—Marty Appel, New York Yankees historian and author of Pinstripe Empire and Casey Stengel

Marty Appel

“Once you start reading, you will not be able to stop. A compelling look at one of the most influential and controversial figures in baseball history. A new generation needs to know the story of Jim Bouton: a man who never wearied of gleefully and hilariously skewering the establishment but who also had the old-school drive to will his dreams into reality. Above all, a lifetime love of baseball shines through in every chapter—a true reflection of Bouton himself.”—Brian Kenny, host for MLB Network and author of Ahead of the Curve: Inside the Baseball Revolution

Brian Kenny

"If the reader has ever read Ball Four, then this book is one that he or she must add to their library as well as it is a great account of the man behind the legendary book."—Guy Who Reviews Sports Books

Guy Who Reviews Sports Books

"When Mitchell Nathanson, a professor of sports law at Villanova, approached Bouton about writing his biography, the pitcher gave his blessing, on one condition: that Nathanson write about him with the honesty he’d tried to bring to the game of baseball. . . . Nathanson moves crisply through the deep back story, though he knows a good detail when he sees one."—John Swansburg, New York Times Book Review

New York Times Book Review - John Swansburg

"Readers who choose to visit Bouton will feel pleased to have made the acquaintance of a truly unique player in the panorama of American sports."—J. Kemper Campbell, Lincoln Journal Star

Lincoln Journal Star - J. Kemper Campbell

★ 05/01/2020

One might wonder how a baseball pitcher with a resume of only 62 major league victories (against 63 losses) merits a comprehensive biography. However, Nathanson (Villanova Univ. Sch. of Law; God Almighty Hisself) uses these pages to their fullest in presenting the life of Jim Bouton (1939–2019), who spent most of his career as a pitcher for the New York Yankees and was a vocal advocate of barring the apartheid state of South Africa from two Olympics. His 1970 tell-all, Ball Four, was controversial at the time, but eventually gained commercial success and became a baseball classic. With revelations of widespread drug use and drunkenness among baseball stars, the book forever altered perceptions of our heroes, such as Mickey Mantle, and how they would be treated in print. After Bouton was essentially blacklisted from the major leagues, he became a sportscaster, actor, entrepreneur, and advocate for the restoration of a rickety former minor league ballpark, to name a few of his endeavors. VERDICT Baseball fans will laugh alongside and, ultimately, feel touched by this look at an iconoclastic, often quixotic man who, despite the charges that his landmark book had hurt the game, loved baseball to the very end.—Jim Burns, formerly with Jacksonville P.L., FL

Library Journal