Bouton

Starred review from May 1, 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

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2020
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Jim Bouton's Ball Four, the book that transformed sports memoirs forever. Nathanson's witty biography of the Yankee pitcher, who died in 2019, arrives just in time to celebrate his account of a year spent with the hapless Seattle Pilots, an expansion team in 1969, when Bouton, previously a star Yankee pitcher, was at the end of his playing career. 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 expos�, showing how the publication and selling of Ball Four changed our expectations of what a sports book could be. Always outspoken, Bouton took on the baseball establishment, showing how major leaguers behaved behind the scenes, humanizing them by shattering the angelic image promulgated by the traditional baseball press. 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)