Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics) Read Free Page A

other people’s lives. And the last time I was sent down to the minor leagues a man I consider my friend said, only half-kidding, I guess, “Why don’t you quit and go out and earn a living like everybody else, ya bum ya?”
    I was piqued for a moment. But then I thought, what the hell, there are a lot of professions that rank even with baseball, or a lot below, in terms of nobility. I don’t think there’s anything so great about selling real estate or life insurance or mutual funds, or a lot of other unimportant things that people do with their lives and never give it a thought. Okay, so I’ll save the world when I get a little older. I believe a man is entitled to devote a certain number of years to plain enjoyment and driving for some sort of financial security.
    You can always be a teacher or a social worker when you’ve reached thirty-five. That gives me five more years and I’m going to use them all. You can’t always be a major-league baseball player. There are only a certain number of years—and I know how few they are—in which you can play baseball. And I think you can be a better teacher if you
have
played baseball, if only for the fact that the kids will listen to you more. I think I’ll have more value at
anything
I do later on for having been a baseball player. I believe that, foolish as it is, Stan Musial has more influence with American kids than any geography teacher. Ted Williams is better known than any of our poets, Mickey Mantle more admired than our scientists. Perhaps I can put my own small fame to work later on.
    Right now, the fact is that I love the game—love to play it, I mean. Actually, with the thousands of games I’ve seen, baseball bores me. I have no trouble falling asleep in the bullpen, and I don’t think I’d ever pay my way into a ballpark to watch a game. But there’s a lot to being
in
the game, a lot to having those dreams.
    A lot of it is foolishness too, grown men being serious about a boy’s game. There’s pettiness in baseball, and meanness and stupidity beyond belief, and everything else bad that you’ll find outside of baseball. I haven’t enjoyed every single minute of it and when I’ve refused to conform to some of the more Neanderthal aspects of baseball thinking I’ve been an outcast. Yet there’s been a tremendous lot of good in it for me and I wouldn’t trade my years in it for anything I can think of. If you doubt me, take a look at my fingertips; I’m growing calluses on them.
    So what follows, then, is not so much a book about Jim Bouton as it is about what I’ve seen and felt playing baseball, for a season, up and down with an expansion team, and for what has been for me so far, a lifetime.

Part 1
They Made Me What I Am Today
     

NOVEMBER
15
    I signed my contract today to play for the Seattle Pilots at a salary of $22,000 and it was a letdown because I didn’t have to bargain. There was no struggle, none of the give and take that I look forward to every year. Most players don’t like to haggle. They just want to get it over with. Not me. With me, signing a contract has been a yearly adventure.
    The reason for no adventure this year is the way I pitched last year. It ranged from awful to terrible to pretty good. When it was terrible, and I had a record 0 and 7, or 2 and 7 maybe, I had to do some serious thinking about whether it was all over for me. I was pitching for the Seattle Angels of the Pacific Coast League. The next year, 1969, Seattle would get the expansion Seattle Pilots of the American League. The New York Yankees had sold me to Seattle for $20,000 and were so eager to get rid of me they paid $8,000 of my $22,000 salary. This means I was actually sold for $12,000, less than half the waiver price. Makes a man think.
    In the middle of August I went to see Marvin Milkes, the general manager of the Seattle Angels, and the future general manager of Pilots. I told him that I wanted some kind of guarantee from him about next year. There