Ball Four My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues

New York: World Publishing Company. Very Good- in Very Good- dust jacket. 1970. Sixth Printing; Hardcover. Ex-Library; 6 1/2 x 9 1/4 x 2"; xiii, 400 pages; Hard cover. DJ. Former library book with typical marks. Pages are clean and tight. 'Ball Four might be the greatest baseball book ever written! Correction, Ball Four might be the greatest sports book ever written. What Bouton accomplished with Ball Four was to tear the cover off of professional sports by exposing the tangled core underneath the canned responses to interviews, the hagiography of sports heroes, and the mundane existence of living out of a suitcase for six months. The haloed Yankees hated this book as it painted their hero Mickey Mantle as less than a shining light, the fans didn't care for that either. Players thought it broke the sacred bonds of The Team. But Bouton was always an iconoclast; he cared and fought for what he thought was fair pay long before the free agent era, he talked to reporters in thoughtful conversations, and he took notes. After Bouton blew out his arm for the Yankees he reinvents himself as a knuckleball pitcher and gets called up to a new franchise, the Seattle Pilots. Filled with castoffs and fringe players the Pilots are the perfect team for Bouton to chronologically capture daily life in major league baseball. ' Appendix. .