All-TIME 100 Nonfiction Books

Ball Four

Baseball players love to guzzle beer, break curfew and chase skirts. Most aren’t scholars and are quick to pop a “greenie” — amphetamines — for an extra kick before the game. These are long-accepted truisms about today’s professional athletes. But in 1970, when former major-league pitcher Jim Bouton shared locker-room secrets in his behind-the-scenes memoir about the 1969 baseball season, such revelations shocked the sports world. Up to that point, pro athletes were bubblegum heroes: the media did not pry into their private lives. Bouton, who slyly took notes and whispered into a tape recorder while playing for the expansion Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros, exposes baseball owners as greedy penny pinchers and coaches as buffoons who state the obvious. The book caused such an uproar that baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn asked Bouton to sign a statement saying Ball Four was a big lie. Bouton declined: the book was honest, insightful and hilarious, and it changed the way the public views its sports “heroes.”

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