Free PDF Ball Four: Twentieth Anniversary Edition, by Jim Bouton ~ tmnseroj

Free PDF Ball Four: Twentieth Anniversary Edition, by Jim Bouton

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Ball Four: Twentieth Anniversary Edition, by Jim Bouton

Free PDF Ball Four: Twentieth Anniversary Edition, by Jim Bouton

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Amazon.com Review

As a player, former hurler Jim Bouton did nothing half-way; he threw so hard he'd lose his cap on almost every pitch. In the early '70s, he tossed off one of the funniest, most revealing, insider's takes on baseball life in Ball Four, his diary of the season he tried to pitch his way back from oblivion on the strength of a knuckler. The real curve, though, is Bouton's honesty. He carves humans out of heroes, and shines a light into the game's corners. A quarter century later, Bouton's unique baseball voice can still bring the heat.

Review

* A book deep in the American vein, so deep in fact it is by no means a sports book"" --David Halberstam""Ball Four is a people book, not just a baseball book."" --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

See all Editorial Reviews

Product details

Paperback: 465 pages

Publisher: Howell Book House; 20th Anniversary edition (July 12, 1990)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0020306652

ISBN-13: 978-0020306658

Product Dimensions:

5.5 x 1.1 x 8.3 inches

Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.3 out of 5 stars

508 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#89,575 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

I'm not a baseball fan, but early this year I heard a brief interview with Jim Bouton and there was something about him that caught my attention - perhaps his voice (you can hear his smile in his voice), perhaps it was his word choice or maybe it was his humor. Regardless, something got to me and I sought out this book. I had a choice between reading it and listening and, because it was read by the author, I opted to get the audiobook.Ball Four is only superficially a book about baseball and you don't need to understand or love baseball to get this book. Ball Four is a coming of age story ... about an adult and for an adult. Bouton is a superb storyteller and observer, but he is also philosopher, a pundit, a prankster and a child. The book at first seems like diary entries or a series of vignettes, but all of a sudden you find you are immersed and entwined in the story of the life of a very special, yet very human, man. For me the baseball was just a framework for the story of a man growing into another man over the period of 30 years. Bouton first opens his mind to the readers, and then he opens his heart - his hopes, fears, dreams, moments when he is great and moments when he is flawed. I laughed (a lot), and I cried (in a good way), and going through Jim Bouton's journey made me a little less scared and a lot more accepting of my own journey. If I ever met Mr. Bouton on the street I would feel like hugging him as I would an old friend.Jim's narration is as revealing as his writing and I encourage you to try this as an audiobook but I finished it only to run out and buy a hard copy so I could someday enjoy this book at a slower pace and linger...Given the book is on multiple "the best lists" I can't imagine how I missed it all these years. I consider this books one of my top 100 books... a desert island book... and one I know that I will read again and again.

I discovered a copy of "Ball Four" in my high school library over 25 years ago, and found it to be laugh-out-loud funny. Jim Bouton, in the twilight of his baseball career, and suffering from a sore arm (this was in the days before sports medicine came along and prolonged careers), reinvented himself as a knuckleball pitcher and hooked on with the lowly expansion Seattle Mariners. His observations on locker room life and on the easy availability of hot young women to professional athletes, was an inspiration to me at age 14. Ever since then, I've picked up a copy of the book every few years (and I have at least three copies by now) and always find something new to enjoy or quote or admire.Other reviewers on this site refer to "Ball Four" as "dated". I could not disagree more. Even though the book was largely written in 1969, it still has a lot to tell us about modern-day society, labor-management relationships, the role of sports in society, and politics. Bouton, as a 30-year-old ballplayer, was unusually observant, and, as he writes from 1969 -- the same year that "Mad Men" is up on TV now, as I write this review -- spokevery perceptively about the kinds of societal change that most of us enjoy watching Don Draper struggle with. Also, as an avowed left-winger, Bouton provides a perspective different to the majority of other baseball figures.Reading "Ball Four", you can choose to just enjoy the more raunchy or R-rated material while ignoring the more social or political material. Or you can read up on the very early years of baseball's labor wars, and get your history lesson on the likes of Bowie Kuhn and Marvin Miller. Or, if you enjoyed the movie "Office Space", there's tons of material here about the short-sightedness of the management, which involved at least 7 increasingly muffled layers of supervision between the owners and the players of a single team. Bouton was a keen student of baseball history, and spends a fair bit of time talking about old players, and the guys he followed when he was a kid; he has the misfortune in 1969 to be coached by Sal Maglie, one of Bouton's childhood heroes but a truly inept pitching coach (as they say, never meet your heroes!)). But, not only that, Bouton figured into the very dawn of today's statistical-oriented baseball analytics --he realized that relief pitchers should be judged by inherited runners scored and baserunners-per-inning ratios, rather than purely by wins and losses. He was immensely valuable as a relief pitcher in 1969 -- his Strat-O-Matic card proves that -- but the Pilots ignored him and under-utilized him, because they weren't paying attention to the right information.So, read "Ball Four" -- and its several updates, issued in 1980, 1990, and 2000. There's something amazing on nearly every page of the book and its supplements -- funny, titillating, insightful, of historical interest, or just plain mind-boggling. There are very few other baseball books that hit their targets so directly, or that are so eminently quotable. The book will be 50 years old soon, but it will never, ever, go out of date.

I first read this book back in the mid 70's when I wanted to learn a little bit about baseball because I wanted to be able to talk with co-workers about the game. I was not a baseball or sports fan at the time. To tell the truth, I'm still not. But I just got a retirement job as an usher at a minor league ballpark and decided that I needed to refresh some info. So, when this book popped up as a Kindle special daily deal, I got it again. It was even better after almost 40 years. What I loved about the book was that it made baseball players human beings and that made me curious about the game. Reading it again made me appreciate what the players went through back then, the difficulty of their lives (in spite of all of the so-called glamour) and how tenuous the baseball career can be. This edition also included updates from many years after it was published and it thrilled me and yes, I cried along with him. It is one of the best books that I have ever read.

I read this book in my high school years in the 70s and again now. I think my rating would be 4/5 stars both times. I enjoyed the humor, baseball stories, and the updates provided in today's version. As a baseball fan, I enjoyed an "insider's view" to coaching, player behavior and attitudes, what happens in non-game time with a team, and relationships between players. It was interesting to see how baseball has changed in some ways (the author "fought" hard for $1000 raise and many players earned less than $20,000) and stayed the same in many ways. In trying to describe why I didn't rate this book a 5, I think I didn't care for the fact he wrote without letting the people he was writing about know. His attitude seemed a little cynical at times in his view of management and players he didn't care for. I think if I were his teammate, I wouldn't have liked to discover his publishing a book about "what happens in the locker room stays in the locker room" type of things either as some baseball people then took offense to. Ball Four was controversial when it was released but seems "tame" now after reading Jose Canseco's revelations and others. All in all, a good read for a baseball person.

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