Ball Four, the Television Series: Ahead of Its Time?

Jim Bouton (right) and John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s Official Historian, sharing the stage at SABR’s 47th annual convention in New York City in 2017. (Photo: Jacob Pomrenke)

 

In the fall of 1976, CBS Television premiered the television series Ball Four, based upon the 1970 book by former major-league pitcher Jim Bouton, a best-seller that took the form of a baseball diary of the 1969 season. That year Bouton pitched for the expansion Seattle Pilots before being traded to the Houston Astros, with whom he ended the season. Bouton was also a beneficiary of editorial guidance from sportswriter Leonard Schecter, and the influential Ball Four was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the hundred most important books of the twentieth century.1 Bouton’s book was reflective of the national mood in the late 1960s and early 1970s in which established institutions like major-league baseball were questioned by a new generation and rising counterculture. In Ball Four, Bouton departed from the hero-worshipping tradition of baseball and sport literature, presenting a more realistic depiction of athletes, among them Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees, as men who struggled with issues of drinking and marital fidelity. In addition, Bouton exposed the degree of hypocrisy present in the national game at its highest level with evidence of sexism, racism, and drug abuse. The baseball establishment led by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn slammed the book, as did many of Bouton’s former teammates. The general public, however, loved the book, which changed the nature of sport journalism.

Thus, it is not surprising that CBS was intrigued with the idea of a television series based on the book and developed by Bouton. Although he was a relatively inexperienced actor, CBS also decided that Bouton would play the lead as pitcher Jim Barton of the Washington Americans who was compiling a baseball diary for Sports Illustrated. It was difficult, however, for the television scripts to reflect the brutal honesty of Bouton’s book because CBS scheduled the show for 8:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. This brought Ball Four into conflict with network censors as the show was broadcast during the Federal Communications Commission-mandated hour of early evening “family friendly” viewing. The more adult themes of the book were overshadowed by juvenile humor, and the television series failed to develop an audience. Ball Four was canceled after only five episodes. While some critics insist that the show failed to reach its promise due to censorship issues, Bouton concedes that he lacked television experience and there were quality issues with Ball Four. In addition, baseball-themed shows have not done well on the small screen, but Bouton speculates that in the less restrictive atmosphere of cable television Ball Four might work today.2 Such discussion, however, tends to ignore the fact that the television series lacked the antiestablishment political punch that made Bouton’s book so appealing.

Bouton’s background offers little indication that he would emerge as an antiestablishment figure on the national baseball scene. He was born on March 8, 1939, in Newark, New Jersey, to a middle-class family. When Jim was 16, his business-executive father moved the family to Chicago Heights, Illinois, where Jim enjoyed some success as a high-school and American Legion pitcher. After earning a scholarship to Western Michigan University in 1958, Bouton was signed to a contract by the New York Yankees. After working his way through the minor-league chain, Bouton joined the Yankees for the 1962 season. The following year he became an All-Star, winning 21 games with a 2.53 earned-run average. A fierce competitor, Bouton threw so hard that he knocked off his cap with many deliveries. In 1964, Bouton enjoyed another excellent season with a record of 18 wins and 13 losses accompanied by a 3.02 earned-run average. In addition to his fine pitching, Bouton earned the reputation as a ballplayer who was willing to challenge Yankee management and speak his mind with the press.3

During the 1969 season, Bouton appeared in 73 games with the Pilots and Astros, winning two games with an earned-run average of 3.96. He was beginning to establish some mastery of the knuckleball, but the hoopla surrounding the publication of Ball Four derailed his career in Houston. After being demoted to Oklahoma City in the summer of 1970, Bouton announced his retirement from the game. However, the publicity surrounding the publication of Ball Four made Bouton a household name.

Commissioner Bowie Kuhn was appalled by Ball Four, and he did not consider its publication to be in the best interests of baseball. He summoned Bouton to his office and was rather shocked when the pitcher arrived accompanied by Marvin Miller and Dick Moss from the players union. If Kuhn expected an apology from Bouton, the commissioner and baseball establishment certainly failed to receive one. Kuhn issued a statement asserting his displeasure with Ball Four but indicated that his office would not be taking any action against Bouton. In his memoir Hardball, Kuhn maintained that he confronted Bouton because he simply did not believe the stories put forth in the book, but in hindsight the commissioner regretted providing Bouton with the publicity to sell more books.5

Although earlier player memoirs such as Jim Brosnan’s The Long Season and Pennant Race drew the ire of the baseball establishment and were denounced for violating the sanctity of the locker room, the reaction to Brosnan was less vitriolic as his approach was more intellectual and detached.6 Bouton, on the other hand, described the sexual and drinking escapades of baseball icon Mickey Mantle, who claimed that he never read Ball Four. Mantle was championed by Yankee teammates such as Tony Kubek and Elston Howard, who was Bouton’s catcher during the pitcher’s tenure with the New York club. Howard described Bouton as “a very self-centered and selfish man” who was angry with the Yankees for trading him after the right-hander became a losing pitcher. Rather than being a heroic chronicler of the truth, Howard depicted Bouton as a loner who was selling out his former teammates for 30 pieces of silver.7

For many readers, Bouton was an intellectual athlete who could place baseball within the larger historical and cultural changes that were taking place in the United States and world during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For example, Bouton relates a trip that he and teammate Gary Bell took to Berkeley while the Seattle club was playing in Oakland. They encountered numerous student activists who were protesting the Vietnam War, racism, and poverty. Bouton concluded that perhaps the real problem in America was that there were too many people like himself and Bell when more advocates for social change were needed. Bouton wrote, “Gary and I are really the crazy ones. I mean, we’re concerned about getting the Oakland Athletics out. We’re concerned about making money in real estate, and about ourselves and our families. These kids, though, are genuinely concerned about what’s going on around them. They’re concerned about Vietnam, poor people, black people. They’re concerned about the way things are and they’re trying to change them.”10 Upon learning that a member of his fan club was dispatched to Vietnam, Bouton quipped, “It just doesn’t seem right that a member of my fan club should be fighting in Vietnam. Or that anybody should.”11And Bouton also believed that protest could bring about change. In Ball Four, he observed that tennis officials in South Africa were discussing the possibility of an integrated Davis Cup team; however, South African leaders were quick to assert that these conversations were not in response to planned protests and boycotts of the apartheid nation. Bouton retorted, “And the increase in the number of swimming pools in Harlem has nothing to do with the riots and the troops withdrawals have nothing to do with the protest movement and the baseball owners broadened our pension coverage not because of any strike but out of an innate sense of fair play. Yeah, surrre.”12

Bouton was also critical of hypocrisy in American society as well as the baseball establishment. He commented upon baseball owners who espoused support for the free-enterprise system while exercising monopoly control over players through the reserve system. He poked fun at the anti-intellectualism and sexism of players and management who did not know how to respond to Bouton’s Seattle teammate Steve “Orbit” Hovley, who grew his hair long and was an avid reader. Bouton also had little patience for those who attributed their on-the-field success to God as if the Deity was a baseball fan. The pitcher confessed, “I’ve been tempted sometimes to say into a microphone that I feel I won tonight because I don’t believe in God. I mean, just for the sake of balance, to let the kids know that a belief in a deity or ‘Pitching for the Master’ is not one of the criteria for major-league success. But I guess I never will.” The iconoclast, however, did criticize evangelist Billy Graham for seeking to discount racial urban unrest by suggesting that communists were behind the civil-rights movement. Speaking of Graham, Bouton wrote, “When a man of his power, a man with such a following makes a statement like that, he is diverting attention from the real causes of riots in the ghettoes. As a result he delays solutions to those real problems, and this is dangerous. My heavens, you’d think I had insulted Ronald Reagan.”13 Bouton also disturbed more conservative parents by responding to a question about young men with long hair by asserting, “The thing that disturbs me about long hair is not the fact that suddenly a whole lot of kids in this country decided to let their hair grow, but that a whole nation of adults would let it disturb them to the point where they were ready to expel otherwise excellent students from school simply because of their long hair.”14 Bouton, however, adopted a   less critical tone when in Ball Four he described the way many ballplayers with too much time on their hands objectified women and poked fun of gays.

But it was the sexual hijinks along with the stories of alcohol abuse and amphetamine use that most angered traditionalist sportswriters. Bouton had betrayed the sanctity of the locker room, and sportswriter Dick Young demanded that Commissioner Kuhn and the Players Association take action to censure Bouton. Joe Falls denounced Bouton for revealing privileged information, concluding, “This business of telling-it-like-it-is is strictly the bunk. It’s a nice, catchy phrase that has a very idealistic sound to it, but nobody ever really tells it how it is, nor is anyone expected to.” An even more strident tone was taken by Wells Twombly, who dismissed Ball Four as “an impudent betrayal of trust, good old rotten Hollywood-style keyhole reporting.”15

Other reviews of Ball Four attempted to place Bouton’s reporting within a broader cultural context. Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Rex Lardner acknowledged that for some traditionalists Ball Four was an anathema, but he concluded, “In an era of sophisticated reappraisal, it is a gem of honest, good-naturedly biased reporting.” In a similar vein, Roger Angell argued that Bouton’s book “never settles into the sportswriting clichés of debunking and anecdotage. What he has given us, rather, is a rare view of a highly complex public profession seen from the innermost inside view of an ironic and courageous mind.” In Christian Century, George G. Hill encouraged readers to carefully examine Ball Four as it constituted “a positive contribution to the needed moral reordering of America.” Striking a more literary note, Cleveland Amory observed that Ball Four was no mere baseball book, “any more than Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi is about riverboats.” Picking up on these literary themes, David Halberstam observed that both Bouton and his critics agreed that baseball was “the great American game, a reflection of what we are and who we are.” But rather than the virtuous institution described by many establishment sportswriters, Bouton found baseball to be a manifestation of American culture that was “more often than not run by selfish, stupid owners, men who deal with their ballplayers in a somewhat sophisticated form of slavery, that despite the reputation of a melting pot, baseball dugouts reek of the same racial and social tensions and decisions that scar the rest of the country, that the underlying social common denominator is fairly crude and reminiscent of nothing so much as one’s high-school locker room.”16

While Ball Four was praised by literary critics and resonated with the growing antiestablishment views of many American readers whose faith in American institutions was soon to be further tested with the Watergate scandal, the baseball establishment had little use for Bouton. Increasingly unable to control his knuckleball, Bouton was out of baseball before the conclusion of the 1970 season. With strong earnings from Ball Four, Bouton decided that he wanted to spend more time with his family, accepting a position as an evening sports reporter with an ABC Television New York City affiliate. Continuing to march to his own drummer, Bouton reported primarily upon high-school and local sports rather than the major-league New York City franchises. He also broadened the exposure of his audience by participating in such activities as roller derby. Baseball historian Mark Armour concludes, “Bouton’s broadcasts were popular with the public, though the local professional teams were unhappy that he had no interest in simply promoting their business as television had been doing for years.” In response to his many baseball critics such as Pete Rose who limited his literary review of Ball Four to “Fuck you, Shakespeare,” Bouton and his editor Schecter penned I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally.”17

Meanwhile, Bouton had not succeeded in getting baseball out of his system as he suggested in his final line from Ball Four, “You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”18 He continued to play baseball with amateur clubs in suburban New Jersey. In addition, he spent a few weeks in 1975 with the Single-A Portland (Oregon) Mavericks of the Northwest League. He had regained control of his knuckleball and pitched well in five games with Portland, winning four games while posting an impressive 2.20 earned-run average. Any thoughts of a baseball comeback, however, were placed on hold when an opportunity arose to produce a television series based upon Ball Four. According to Bouton, the series was an outgrowth of ideas generated at the Lion’s Head Bar in Greenwich Village while drinking with his friends Newsday television critic Marvin Kitman and New York Post sportswriter Vic Ziegel. Bouton described the show’s creation as somewhat of a lark, commenting, “We just thought it might be a good thing to do. It certainly was fun to listen to all these characters. So why couldn’t a sitcom be just as funny as the real players, the real guys.” After submitting the project to CBS Television, Bouton asserts, he and his friends were rather surprised when the network gave a green light to the series with the proviso that the creators remain as the chief writers for the program. The network hoped that Ball Four might resonate with audiences that made such ensemble situation comedies as Barney Miller, Welcome Back Kotter, and M*A*S*H major hits during the 1970s.19

Bouton did not find the television creative process as satisfying as he originally anticipated, observing, “Our plan was sit around and write in the daytime, but since it took so long to come up with anything, we’d still be writing stuff at two in the morning.”20 The slow pace of the writing worried CBS executives who often visited the writers to make suggestions, but Bouton and his friends were often contemptuous of the television people who demonstrated little understanding of baseball and its culture. After all, it was under the ownership of CBS from 1964 to 1973 that the New York Yankees struggled at the box office and in the field, finishing last in 1966 and drawing below one million fans in 1973.21

But most of the conflict between the show’s creators and CBS executives was over the show’s unfortunate scheduling during the Federal Communications Commission-mandated family hour programing. Part of the appeal of Bouton’s book was colorful and profane language employed by such baseball characters as Seattle Pilots manager Joe Schultz. There was no way in 1976 that viewers on network television were going to hear Schultz’s exclamation of “shitfuck.” Bouton, however, was frustrated that considerable time was wasted with rather arbitrary decisions such as approving “horse-crock” rather than “horseshit.” CBS censors had a reputation for closely monitoring the content of its programing as was evident during the late 1960s with the controversy arising from network executives attempting to censor the popular Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Thus, the CBS Standards and Practices Department nixed “any spitting, burping, chewing of tobacco, popping of ‘greenies,’ or any other potential offensive behavior from the show’s characters.” Apparently this directive also included any affirmation that rookie pitcher Bell Westlake (David James Carroll) was gay, but it was all right to make fun of his feminine characteristics. Westlake was one of the first gay characters on network television, but CBS was not prepared to acknowledge this. And perhaps American audiences in 1976 were no more ready than baseball locker rooms for an openly gay character. Today television viewers are more open, but Major League Baseball still often struggles with the acceptance of gay athletes. Summing up his arguments with the censors, Bouton lamented, “We were not allowed to put any of the grittiness of life in the majors on the screen.”22

In addition, the show included little baseball action. Most of Ball Four’s scenes were staged in the locker room or hotel rooms of the players rather than on the baseball diamond. Thus, most of the show was filmed on stage in New York City before a live television audience. Ball Four seemed artificial, and Bouton assigned the censors primary responsibility for its failure, leading some to conclude that the Ball Four television series was ahead of its time. However, baseball in general has not fared well on television. Even shows based on popular films such as A League of Their Own and The Bad News Bears failed to resonate with television viewers, and Steven Bochco, who created such police drama hits as Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, could not entice an audience for his baseball production Bay City Blues. An exception to this history of baseball on the small screen is Eastbound & Down, which aired from 2009 to 2013 on HBO. Cable television provided greater freedom for the show’s creators and focused upon a politically incorrect former major-league pitcher, perhaps based on the exploits of John Rocker, who returns to his hometown and becomes a substitute teacher. Thus, Bouton acknowledges that perhaps his television series was ahead of its time and might fare much better today with the more permissive environment of cable television.23

Another problem for the series was the decision to cast Bouton in the lead as journal-writing pitcher Jim Barton. Bouton had some acting experience, having portrayed villain Terry Lennox in the 1973 Robert Altman production of The Long Goodbye featuring Elliott Gould as private detective Philip Marlowe. However, he had no experience with comedy, which most performers acknowledge as being more difficult than drama. While Bouton quipped that CBS signed him for the lead because he was willing to work cheap, baseball historian Peter Golenbock was quite critical of the network for overextending Bouton. Golenbock observed, “I think too much of it was placed on Jim’s shoulders. He was a ballplayer, and he was an author, and he was a fabulous sportscaster, but he didn’t have a great deal of experience in show business. And my sense was that he didn’t get the help that he could have had, either as a TV writer or an actor. But I give the guy a tremendous amount of credit for having the balls to go out there and be the lead in a TV show. A lot of people would have said, ‘I can’t do this.’”24

While the ensemble cast also included black and Latino players, Bouton’s character Barton bonded primarily with his catcher Rhino Rhinelander, played by former professional football player Ben Davidson. Best known for his All-Star play with the Oakland Raiders, the 6-foot-8-inch defensive end also played with the Green Bay Packers and Washington Redskins. After retiring from football, Davidson tried his hand at acting, appearing in such films as M*A*S*H and Conan the Barbarian in addition to Ball Four. However, perhaps Davidson was best known by television viewers for his Miller Lite commercials. Bouton loved working with Davidson, whose physical improvisations, such as hanging one of the actors from a clubhouse clothes hook by the back of his shirt, were not appreciated by CBS executives. The rapport between Bouton and Davidson, nevertheless, tended to make the show a white buddy project quite a bit different from the more multicultural themes of the book.25

Reviews and rating for Ball Four were poor. Sports Illustrated was disappointed by the show’s “mediocrity,” while the series faced strong network completion in its time slot from The Bionic Woman on ABC and Little House on the Prairie on NBC. Ball Four was sandwiched between the two popular CBS situation comedies Good Times and All in the Family, and when ratings indicated that Ball Four was having a negative impact on viewership for these two programs, the baseball series was canceled after airing only five episodes. Rather than expressing anger over the rapid cancellation of the program, Bouton seemed to be more relieved, commenting, “Ohhh, thank you! Now we can live our lives – we can sleep, we can have weekends, we can have friends over. We can be real people again! God, please don’t let me write any more scripts.”26 Pulling the plug on Ball Four also allowed Bouton, at age 38, to pursue his dream of returning to major-league baseball. In September 1978 he was called up by the Atlanta Braves after pitching well for the team’s Savannah farm club in the Southern League. Bouton appeared in five games with the Braves while compiling a record of 1-3 and a 4.97 earned-run average. Having achieved his goal, Bouton retired from the game he loved, although with his writing and activism such as preserving Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, he hardly faded from the public eye.27

In retrospect, Bouton has few regrets regarding his brief career in television programing. He did not bemoan the fact that Ball Four was canceled so quickly by CBS, which demonstrated little faith in the project and gave the series precious little time to foster a following. Employing hindsight, Bouton recognizes the failures of the show and expresses relief that Ball Four’s episodes are unavailable today with the exception of the show’s opening credits featuring a theme song from popular folk/rock artist Harry Chapin. Of his Ball Four television experience, Bouton concludes, “I never think about it as a negative in my life. It’s not like, ‘Oh boy, we really screwed that up,’ or, ‘That was terrible!’ It was so much fun just to sit there and fail at a very high level.”

Yet, Bouton offers little insight into the actual content of the show and how Ball Four may have contributed to its own demise. An important aspect of Bouton’s book is the author’s commentary on the larger culture and the changes taking place within American society. Thus, Bouton’s observations on topics such as the Vietnam War, race relations, youth culture, campus protest, and fashion such as long hair for males are essential elements of the book’s appeal to many younger baseball fans. In a similar fashion, the commercial success of The Bad News Bears as a film in 1976 was due to how the picture reflected changing views of American society and sport. According to historian David Zang, The Bad News Bears was “the most subversive sports film ever made” as it challenged the traditional interpretation of sport as building character. Instead, Zang argues, “From their beer-guzzling coach to their foulmouthed shortstop to their juvenile delinquent hitting star, the Bears were heroes that only a society that had lost its sense of moral infallibility could love.”28A female pitching star along with Latino and African-American players also made the Bears representative of a more inclusive society. And Bouton’s book seemed to capture this sense of cultural change. Peter Golenbock insists that Ball Four “absolutely changed sportswriting. When I started writing, the idea was that I wanted to write books with the same honesty as Ball Four.” Accordingly, Golenbock asserts that he would not have been able to write The Bronx Zoo, an account of the Yankees and George Steinbrenner in the late 1970s, without Bouton’s example and courage in taking on the baseball establishment.29

Bouton initially seemed to recognize that his television project required the same broad cultural focus as his book. He hoped that the show would antagonize Commissioner Kuhn and provide an antidote for the Game of the Week, but Bouton recognized that the series would need to attract a wide range of viewers, especially women. Bouton insisted, “The book had appeal to women because it told them interesting things about people. The reason women are turned off by sports on television is the way it is presented. It comes from a statistical point of view and that’s boring. Women’s participation is healthier than men’s. Men may appreciate statistics – not women.” The series, accordingly, would not concentrate exclusively on baseball. Bouton concluded, “Most of the story lines will be about ordinary people, facing ordinary people, facing ordinary situations – love, life, overweight problems, politics.”30

There is little indication that Bouton followed his own advice in developing the television series. From reviews and the opening credits of the show Ball Four appears primarily focused upon the sexual escapades and locker-room antics of its protagonists. For example, the opening credits feature the players leaning out of a hotel-room window and employing binoculars to leer at women, while there are no major female characters in the production. There is some effort to create diversity with black and Latino teammates, as well as a gay player, but the emphasis is upon the antics of pitcher Barton (Bouton) and catcher Rhinelander (Davidson), making the show more of a traditional white buddy story. In summarizing the series for the 20th anniversary edition of Ball Four, Bouton emphasized the male comradery of the locker room while eschewing the political commentary that characterized the book and its cultural impact. Bouton wrote, “A locker room is a freewheeling place where anything goes, offering more flexibility than a living room or a classroom. It’s like an army barracks where people expect put-down humor, ethnic jokes, gross sarcasm, and insults. The partial nudity with male cheesecake potential should attract a large female audience. Players from every ethnic group, economic level, and educational background are thrown together naturally in an occupation which causes constant tension. And, the best part of all, if an actor demands a bigger contract, he can simply be traded.”31 These limitations were also noted by Melissa Ludtke in her review of Ball Four for Sports Illustrated. Ludtke argued, “The mediocrity of the opening show is particularly unfortunate because Bouton had hoped to give a true portrayal of his baseball experience in the series. Pill-popping, religion and women sports-writers in the locker room and homosexuality are some of the issues that he would like to cover. With fewer than one-third of this season’s new prime-time shows likely to survive until spring, the odds seem slim that ‘Ball Four’ will last long enough to fully explore baseball’s other side.”32

The book also included male bonding and the objectification of women, but the fact that such sexual escapades by well-known athletes could be publicly acknowledged provided an opportunity to question the larger society that was seemingly missing from the television series. Bouton’s Ball Four shocked many in the baseball establishment by speaking openly of sexual liaisons between players and baseball groupies or Annies. Similar tales were told regarding Babe Ruth and so-called baseball Daisies in the 1920s, but post-World War II baseball endeavored to produce a sanitized version of the game and its heroes. Bouton’s exposé blew the lid off baseball’s ostensible allegiance to family and consensus values. In an essay on gender and baseball, historian David Voigt found positive possibilities in baseball’s shift from paternal to maternal values, arguing, “It is fair to say that Bouton learned that freedom to talk about sex is directly related to freedom to criticize other institutions. Which is after all the essence of the matrist trend – that matrism is laden with opportunities for expanded personal freedom provided that enough Americans are willing to exercise the right.”33 Nevertheless, the freedom celebrated by Bouton often provided opportunities for men to sexually exploit women in the gendered renditions of “studs” and “sluts” rather that offering a sexually egalitarian playing field.

Female baseball fans in the 1970s, however, refused to accept male-defined roles. During the decade, women moved beyond the role of the “other”; filing lawsuits to open up the baseball training ground of Little League to girls and lobbying for passage of Title IX, which sought to provide equality of opportunity for women in the nation’s schools and universities.

Tilla Vahanian, a New York City psychiatrist, told the New York Times that competitive play enhanced the self-esteem of women. According to Vahanian, “The old stereotype was that sport was a purely masculine endeavor, and women did not attend sports events for fear of losing their femininity. But now we find that a great comradeship exists between men and women when they can share roles.” Another woman told TV Guide, “Guys have this obsession that girls who like baseball are groupies. I mean, if a guy likes one of the Pittsburgh Pirates does that mean he is after him sexually.”34 This kind of commentary challenging the male hegemony in baseball is what Voigt had in mind when he suggested that sexual freedom could bring greater equality to American society as well as the sport of baseball. Thus, perhaps one of the major reasons for the failure of Ball Four as a television series is not that Bouton’s project was ahead of its time, but rather that in regard to gender roles it was behind the changing times.

 

Notes

1 Jim Bouton with Leonard Schecter, Ball Four: Twentieth Anniversary Edition (New York: Wiley Publishing, 1990; originally published 1970); and The New York Public Library’s Books of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

2 Dan Epstein, “Ball Four, You’re Out: How a Classic Baseball Book Became a Failed Baseball Sitcom,” Vice Sports, September 22, 2016 <sportsvice.com/en_us/article/ball-four-book-became-a-failed-baseball-sitcom> (accessed March 1, 2017).

3 For background information on Jim Bouton see Mark Armour, “Jim Bouton,” SABR BioProject (accessed July 5, 2016); and Leonard Schecter, “Jim Bouton –  Everything in Its Place,” Sport (March 1964): 71-73.

4 Jim Bouton, “A Mission to Mexico City,” Sport (August 1969): 30.

5 For the meeting between Bouton and Kuhn see Jim Bouton with Leonard Schecter, I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1971), 68-79; Lowell Reidenbaugh, “Author Bouton Hits Jackpot – With Bowie’s Assist,” The Sporting News, August 8, 1970; and Bowie Kuhn, Hardball: The Education of a Baseball Commissioner (New York: Basic Books, 1987): 72-73.

6 Jim Brosnan, The Long Season: An Inside Chronicle of the Baseball Year as Seen by a Major League Pitcher (New York: Harper & Row, 1960); and Brosnan, Pennant Race: The Classic Game-by-Game Account of a Championship Season, 1961 (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2017; originally published 1962).

7 Joseph Durso, “Elston Howard Replies,” New York Times, August 8, 1970.

8 Reidenbaugh, “Author Bouton Hits Jackpot.”

9 Arlene Howard with Ralph Wimbish, Elston and Me: The Story of the First Black Yankee (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 164-165.

10 Bouton, Ball Four, 145.

11 Ibid., 119.

12 Ibid., 194.

13 Ibid., 168-169 and 214.

14 Ibid., 215.

15 Dick Young, “Young Ideas,” The Sporting News, June 8, 1970; Joe Falls, “A Blast at Bouton Brand of Realism,” The Sporting News, June 20, 1970; Wells Twombly, “Beware of Snoopy Colleagues,” The Sporting News, June 20, 1970.

16 Rex Lardner, “The Oddball With a Knuckleball,” New York Times Book Review, July 26, 1970; Roger Angell, “Ball Four,” New Yorker, 46 (July 25, 1970): 79; George G. Hill, “Down in the Dugout,” Christian Century, 87 (September 23, 1970); 1126; Cleveland Amory, “Trade Winds,” Saturday Review, 53 (August 1, 1970): 10-11; and David Halberstam, “Baseball and the National Mythology,” Harper’s Magazine, 241 (September 1970): 22-25.

17 Armour, SABR BioProject, and Bouton, I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally.

18 Bouton, Ball Four, 398.

19 Epstein, “Ball Four,” Vice Sports.

20 Ibid.

21 Marty Appel, Pinstripe Empire: The New York Yankees From Before the Babe to After the Boss (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012).

22 Epstein, “Ball Four,” Vice Sports; David Biancalli, Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the “Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” (New York: Touchstone, 2010); Billy Bean with Chris Bull, Going the Other Way: An Intimate Memoir of Life In and Out of Major League Baseball (New York: Marlowe & Company, 2005); and Glenn Burke with Erik Sherman, Out at Home: The True Story of Glenn Burke, Baseball’s First Openly Gay Player (New York: Berkley Books, 2015).

23 John Fester, “Baseball-themed TV Series Have Been Few and Short Lived,” Sporting News, September 21, 2016 <sportingnews.com/mlb/news> (accessed February 15, 2017).

24 Rob Neyer, “Ball Four Changed Sports and Books,” ESPN, June 15, 2000.<espn.go.com/mlb/ballfour/neyer.html> (accessed May 9, 2004).

25 Lisa Dillman, “Ben Davidson Dies at 72; Oakland Raider, Fixture in Beer Commercials,” Los Angeles Times, July 4, 2012.

26 Epstein, “Ball Four,” Vice Sports; and Melissa Ludtke, “Two Strikes on ‘Ball Four,’” Sports Illustrated, September 27, 1976: 38.

27 See the book Jim Bouton, Foul Ball (North Egremont, Massachusetts: Bulldog Publishing, 2010).

28 David W. Zang, Sports Wars: Athletes in the Age of Aquarius (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001), 141-142.

29 Peter Golenbock quoted in Neyer, “Ball Four Changed Sports and Books”; and Sparky Lyle with Peter Golenbock, The Bronx Zoo: The Astonishing Inside Story of the 1978 World Champion New York Yankees (New York: Crown, 1979).

30 Jay Sharbutt, “Bouton Stars in Series Created From His Book,” Sarasota Journal, September 22, 1976.

31 Bouton, Ball Four, 419.

32 Ludtke, “Two Strikes on ‘Ball Four,’” 38.

33 David Voigt, “Sex in Baseball: Reflections of Changing Taboos,” Journal of Popular Culture, 12:3 (December 1978): 402.

34 Gerald Eskenazi, “In the Stands, Many Cheers Have a Higher Pitch,” New York Times, June 6, 1977; and Grace Lichtenstein, “They’d Rather Break a Date Than Miss a Game; Women Sports Fans Are Coming Out of the Closet,” TV Guide (March 6, 1976), 8-11.