Any list of the most consequential baseball players not in the Hall of Fame has to include Jim Bouton. Now, Bouton finally has a biography befitting his influence in Mitchell Nathanson's wonderful Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original.

Nathanson seeks to present a full-scale, warts and all biography of Bouton, and was in fact encouraged in that direction by the subject himself. He delivers in spectacular fashion.

While Bouton was best known as the author of the seminal tell-all about the 1969 season, Ball Four, he was much more than a memoirist. The book follows Bouton from his early days in New Jersey and Illinois, to Western Michigan University, and on into professional baseball. The story continues as Bouton breaks in to the major leagues and contributes to the pennant-winning New York Yankee teams of the early 1960s. Arm trouble that Bouton was unable to shake led to his move away from the Yankees and finishing out his career with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros.

Of course, there was also Ball Four. The book broke all of the rules formerly observed by sports titles- it was honest and told secrets while paying no heed to the aw shucks, just glad to play the game pablum that was standard at the time. Ball Four made ballplayers human- insecure and crass, funny and prickly, motivated by money, and sex, and greed. Bouton named names, slayed sacred cows, and introduced phrases that fans of baseball history recognize to this day, including "smoke 'em inside" and "pound the Budweiser."

While the public loved the book, those inside the game of baseball did not. An enduring question is whether Ball Four pushed Bouton to the game's outer edges, or if Bouton existed on the game's outer edges and thus felt the freedom to write a book like Ball Four. Reading of his life and personality, the reader is left with the impression that if Bouton couldn't find a few cages to rattle wherever he went, then why even bother?

Ball Four may be the crown jewel of Bouton's public life, but it wasn't the end of the story. Nathanson does admirable work detailing his other ventures, from his time on the news desk of local New York television to his creation of a popular sports themed candy.

Nathanson has done his research, using extensive interviews he did with his subject and many other around him. He also found plenty more in the archives to strengthen his narrative and ably tell the story in enjoyable prose.

All baseball fans will enjoy Bouton and learn much along the way.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.

This book is well written and well reserached making it an interesting read. The author brings Bouton to life and tells the story of his complete life and personality rather than the Yankees pitcher who was a major piece in their getting to a couple of World Series in the sixties and his tame by today's standards tell all book "Ball Four." I learned a great deal about the man and his personality and what drove him to success outside of baseball. This is a definite read for any Yankees fan.

I received a free Kindle copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my nonfiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook  page.

The stories from those who were baseball fans around a particular age in the fall of 1970 are remarkably similar. They were usually boys in high school or close to entering it. Their parents came around and asked what they wanted for Christmas or their birthday, and the answer came back, “I’d like a baseball book.”

But they didn’t want just any baseball book. They wanted a particular baseball book. The parents, who probably hadn’t been paying attention to the fuss caused by this particular baseball book, probably didn’t give it much thought as they headed to the book store to buy it. They probably were merely happy to see their boy showing interest in reading.

And that’s how a certain generation came to acquire “Ball Four” – Jim Bouton’s diary of the 1969 baseball season. Their parents didn’t know what was inside of those covers, but their kids did. The youngsters learned about drug use and Peeping Toms and office politics and the joys and frustrations of playing the game. Every assumption we used to have about the baseball life was essentially blown up, page by page.

What’s more, Bouton was the perfect man to perform the demolition – someone at the right place in the right time. Not only was he an outsider – someone who didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the group – but he was also smart and funny. “Ball Four” was frequently hilarious. It holds up today quite well on a number of levels.

Those kids, who are now on the verge of retirement, probably are a big part of the target audience of “Bouton,” a biography by Mitchell Nathanson. They will enjoy this thoroughly.

It’s always interesting to read stories about how baseball players were scouted and “recruited” in the days before the amateur draft began in 1965. Bouton was not a sensation in high school, but was persistent and worked his way toward prospect status. After spending a little time in college, he signed with the New York Yankees – who, in that era, more or less had their pick of players because everyone wanted to play with a perennial champion. Bouton surprised everyone by moving into the Yankees’ starting rotation.

Bouton was a 21-game winner in 1963 and pitched in the World Series, but he was already starting to feel pain when he threw. Oh oh. He scratched out one more good season in 1964, and then he and the Yankees, by coincidence, both disintegrated. Bouton hung around the Yankees organization for a few years without success, and his career was clearly going nowhere.

However, along the way, Bouton made friends with some of the sports writers covering the Yankees in that era – the ones that had noticed what was going on in the Sixties and had stopped writing the same old stories that had been part of sports journalism for a few decades. Bouton was the perfect subject for them – smart, funny, accessible, and aware.

You can see the roots of “Ball Four” taking shape here, and that section might be the most interesting part of the book. Bouton teamed up with Leonard Shecter, and decided to work on a diary of Bouton’s baseball year. Everything fell into place for the project. Bouton started the season with the first-year Seattle Pilots, a collection of has-beens and never-will-bes, and ended it with the Houston Astros, who were on the fringes of the pennant race. Bouton wrote down notes on what he saw, and read those thoughts into a tape recorder – and shipped everything to Shecter, who turned it into a book.

You may have heard what happened from there. The Baseball Establishment reacted with absolute horror, which did nothing but increase sales to those who wondered what all the fuss was about. A classic was born, and something of a folk hero was created.

The story wanders a bit from there, if only because Bouton’s life did the same. He’d get an idea in his head, and it would be hard to dislodge it until it was played out. The pitcher did return to the majors for a short time with Atlanta in 1978, when others would have given up on that dream long ago. Bouton went into sportscasting in New York City, where his free-spirited approach of ignoring the usual rules in the field helped pave the way for the revolution in that industry. Some business ventures didn’t work, some of them – like “Big League Chew’ bubble gum – were a fabulous success. Bouton always something new was just over the horizon.

Nathanson talked to many people who provide perspective on Bouton’s life … or, in a sense, lives. The families, including both of Bouton’s wives, are quite forthcoming about how everything happened. Professional associates also had plenty to say about him. Even when they didn’t particularly like what Bouton did, they agree that he certainly ranked as one of the most memorable characters in his life.

It’s hard to think that anyone who hasn’t read “Ball Four” will be too interested in this story from a distance. However, the book is still out there if you wish to find it, and it is still worth your time. For those who have memorized its contents, though, this book will be eagerly gobbled up by those anxious to read the rest of the story.

I love well-written biographies. I love learning about interesting people.
So I love biographies about interesting people. “Bouton” by Mitchell Nathanson, is both well-written and its subject very interesting. So, despite unease about the tone of the biography, I strongly recommend this book for readers whether one is a sports fan or not. The life and personal story of Jim Bouton follows the story of a (short-time) New York Yankee pitchers in the early 1960’s before quickly descending into the life of a “has-been” washed-up ball player traveling down the road of failure. Yet Bouton’s flash of stardom led to a successful career in the emerging world of “happy talk” local news and sports before moving into political activism, book-writing, and questionable personal lifestyle choices. This is a “five-star” read that still left me unsettled by its sympathetic tone of the writer to his subject. If Nathanson is to be believed, Bouton was darn-near a Mensa candidate due to his ability to come up with one genius idea after another. Even Bouton’s business failures were due to his being too far ahead of the rest of us and thus a victim of being prescient, not stupid. Even Bouton’s attempt to bring his best-selling book “Ball Four” to weekly television was the fault of everybody else associated to the project—if only they had all listened to Bouton!
Except for that complaint I found the book engrossing and couldn’t a it to turn the page to follow Bouton’s life journey. Thanks to NetGalley for the chance to read an advanced copy of “Bouton.”

A comprehensive biography of the man who brought the first “insider” sports book to the market, and paid with his career. “Bouton” shows how Jim Bouton was much more than just Ball Four, and how his personality would always lead him to be an insider and an outsider. Far from a hagiography, but with comprehensive access to sources, this is a fine book and worthwhile read for any baseball fan who’s picked over Ball Four, whether once or a hundred times.

Jim Bouton is remembered mostly for the book titled “Ball Four” a tell-all book about the goings-on with the life of baseball players away from fans. Mostly he broke the unwritten rule of not speaking out and telling what goes on in the planes, clubhouse, locker room, etc... By the time I read the book, it was years after it was published and he was long gone out of baseball.
Here in this book, you get a good look at the man and his drive, his competitiveness in his childhood that would lead him to a career with the Yankees. It is they’re and the few years that as a starting pitcher that he would shine in the regular season winning twenty-one games in 63 and 18 in 64. Just in those two years, he would throw 520 innings not counting World Series. He pitched in three World Series games and was 2-1 24 innings pitched with an era of 1.48. they would call him the bulldog and he was known for his cap to fly off after every pitch. By the end of 65, you can really say his pitching career was over, his arm was gone and he was going back to working on his knuckleball. From 63 to 65 he pitched 804 innings and then another 24 in the World Series. That would be an average of 268 innings per season. For him I guess it was worth it for when his arm started to bother him, he still continued to pitch, wherein today's game he would have been shut down and they would have found out the issue as soon as the speed of his fastball dropped. I did like the stories he talked about with the old Yankees when he first came up with them and with his first pitching coach Johnny Sain those conversations, I thought were very different than other coaches.
When you get to the part of him writing the book, he had already written some articles for a few magazines and he had a friendship with a few reporters that some other ballplayers did not have. It is a toss-up as to you knew he was writing a book and who did not know but to say the majority of players were mad would be an understatement. He would also be called into the commissioner’s office which did not go well for the commissioner.
The last quarter of the book deals with his later life and his divorce from his first wife and I got the impression that he actually did some of the things he wrote about in his book saying other ballplayers had done on their wives. Which for me was just sad. Overall, I liked this book and was really glad that I read it.

For a book to rate five stars in my world, it must be interesting and well written AND a story I don't want to end.

"Bouton", by Mitchell Nathanson, has the first two characteristics. By the last page, however, I was ready for it to be over.

Nathanson gives the reader the full story of Jim Bouton's life. By its conclusion, you know his childhood, his journey through the minor leagues, his Yankee days, the "Ball Four" backstory and reaction, his various comeback attempts, his many side endeavors, and his marriages and divorce.

I now feel well versed in Jim Bouton. I've read both of Bouton's baseball books and was eager to tackle his biography. Mitchell Nathanson is a very thorough researcher and an excellent writer. There is nothing mechanically wrong with this book. It's just that I'd had enough of the book and enough of this review.

When the book “Ball Four” was published in 1970, it shook the baseball world to its core. It was basically a tell-all book, and it wasn’t the first book of its kind as “The Long Season” was a similar book published a decade earlier and “Behind the Mask” also previously released. But given the some of the lurid (for the times) details of the day-to-day life of a ball player, the exposure of just how one-sided contract negotiations were before the days of free agency, and some other secrets exposed, “Ball Four” was so controversial that the commissioner of baseball, Bowie Kuhn, demanded a meeting with the author, pitcher Jim Bouton. This book is a wonderful biography of Bouton by Mitchell Nathanson that shows there is much more to Bouton than just a baseball player.

The reader will learn that early on, while Bouton was a competitive person and loved to play sports, he also wanted to learn other facets of life as well. This isn’t to say he was an outstanding student, but he was a keen observer and liked to acquire knowledge from many different sources, not just textbooks. Something else that is interesting about his early life is that his youth sports experience was ahead of its time as he wanted to devote all his energy to one sport, baseball, instead of multiple sports.

His baseball career is a very interesting section of the book as Nathanson not only talks about his time as a successful pitcher for the Yankees, but also about Bouton’s relationship with pitching coach Johnny Sain. Like so many other pitchers, Sain not only made Bouton a better pitcher but also left a lasting impression. Nathanson even makes talking about Bouton’s quirk of having his hat fall off his head on nearly every pitch seem intriguing.

But injuries and a fastball that wasn’t as fast any longer led to a decline in Bouton’s effectiveness and he ended up with the expansion Seattle Pilots in 1969. But that season turned out to be the most important one in Bouton’s life as he took copious notes, recorded many conversations and basically documented nearly everything that happened during his season with the Pilots. Bouton also never got rid of those papers and cassette tapes, storing them in what became the “butter yellow box.” He took those notes and wrote “Ball Four” with the help of sportswriter Leonard Schecter. While it was a hit with many baseball readers, especially younger ones with whom Bouton shared many similar political and cultural beliefs, it caused quite a commotion in the baseball establishment. Not only in the commissioner’s office, but in locker rooms and press boxes all across baseball, “Ball Four” exposed many secrets that weren’t too kind to the game.

While the book was a best seller, it did have effectively blackball Bouton from not only the Yankees, who would not invite him back to the stadium for nearly 30 years, but also from baseball. He did attempt comebacks (this trait is shown time and time again by Nathanson with some wonderful prose) in all levels of the game, which culminated in a short stint on the roster of the Atlanta Braves in 1978, but for all intensive purposes, he struggled with baseball after writing the book.

Of course, the thirst for knowledge outside of baseball kept Bouton busy on other projects, including writing other books. These included follow-ups to “Ball Four” titled “I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally” and “Ball Five”. There was also a book about the town of Pittsfield, Massachusettes when they proposed replacing a very old ballpark with a newer one called “Foul Ball.” While the incentive behind writing that was to expose corruption in the town instead of anything about the game of baseball, Bouton met the same fate as he did with “Ball Four”, namely that he made many new enemies.

Nathanson’s account of these endeavors of Bouton, as well as the sharing of his personal life that resulted in a divorce and subsequent re-marriage that changed him profoundly, make for great reading that will be difficult for a reader to put down. 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.

I wish to thank University of Nebraska Press for providing a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Terrific read. Very thorough., well researched and well written . A must for any Yankee fan..

Includes a complete bio of Bouton , Detailed description of the writing and reaction to Ball Four as well as Jim"s many other endeavors

The best books on sport are about far more than sport itself and this wonderful biography is a prime example. it tells the tale of a true baseball maverick, a man far ahead of his time in the mid 60s who would not conform to the norms of behaviour and would always make himself heard.

No more so than in his epic "Ball Four" the first real insider's account of the sport which told to exactly how it was. Its publication made Bouton a pariah but the book lives on. I still have a dogeared copy on my bookshelf from when I borrowed it from a good friend in Manhattan over 35 years ago. Sorry Doug, and no I really do not think you are getting it back anytime soon as I still read it from time to time.

Mitchell Nathanson is an accomplished biographer who had the full support of his subject, sadly no longer with us and he paints a marvellous picture of a true one-off.

The book is a fitting tribute to a gifted polymath whose name and writing will live long after he himself has gone.