Jim Bouton (1939–2019)
Författare till Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues
Om författaren
James Alan Bouton was born in Newark on March 8, 1939. He started out playing American Legion ball, trying to perfect his knuckleball pitch. He graduated from Bloom High School in Chicago Heights, Ill. He spent a year at Western Michigan University before he was signed by the Yankees in December visa mer 1958. He made it to the big leagues in 1962. He was a pitcher of modest achievement who wrote the baseball tell all book - Ball Four in 1970. It told of selfishness, dopiness, childishness and meanspiritedness of young men often lionized for playing a boy¿s game very well, and many readers saw it, approvingly or not, as a scandalous betrayal of the baseball clubhouse. The book was his account of the 1969 baseball season, seven years after his big-league debut with the Yankees. It was also his attempt at age 30 to salvage a once-promising career by developing the game¿s most peculiar and least predictable pitch: the knuckleball. He later wrote his follow -up book I¿m Glad You Didn¿t Take It Personally. James Alan Bouton passed away on July 10, 2019 at the age of 80 after a long struggle with vascular dementia. (Bowker Author Biography) visa färre
Foto taget av: jimbouton.com
Verk av Jim Bouton
Ball Four Turns Forty 1 exemplar
Ball Four by Jim Bouton (1971-05-03) 1 exemplar
Associerade verk
Taggad
Allmänna fakta
- Vedertaget namn
- Bouton, Jim
- Namn enligt folkbokföringen
- Bouton, James Alan
- Andra namn
- Bulldog (nickname)
Ass-eyes (nickname) - Födelsedag
- 1939-03-08
- Avled
- 2019-07-10
- Kön
- male
- Nationalitet
- USA
- Födelseort
- Newark, New Jersey, USA
- Dödsort
- Great Barrington, Massachusetts, USA
- Dödsorsak
- cerebral amyloid angiopathy
- Bostadsorter
- Great Barrington, Massachusetts, USA
- Utbildning
- Western Michigan University
- Yrken
- baseball player
journalist
inventor
baseball pitcher - Relationer
- Bouton, Bobbie (ex-wife)
- Organisationer
- New York Yankees (1962-68)
Seattle Pilots (1969)
Houston Astros (1969-70)
Atlanta Braves (1978)
WABC-TV
WCBS-TV - Priser och utmärkelser
- Member, American League All-Star Team (1963)
Shrine of the Eternals (Inductee, 2001)
Medlemmar
Recensioner
Listor
New York Yankees (1)
Read These Too (1)
Priser
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Associerade författare
Statistik
- Verk
- 8
- Även av
- 3
- Medlemmar
- 1,785
- Popularitet
- #14,424
- Betyg
- 4.0
- Recensioner
- 48
- ISBN
- 34
- Favoritmärkt
- 2
In a way, every game of baseball is a conversation with its history. It’s America’s oldest professional sport, and sometimes it really shows its age. On lists of the greatest players ever, there will be no shortage of those born in the 19th century. Everyday of the season, games are played in 100 year old stadiums. On TV, stat lines are constantly being compared to what came before. Trends are identified and analyzed with mathematical precision. Every few years a new type of stat is come up with, and it is used to reassess the entire history of the game. Innovations are rare, and are often views as heretical by a sizable portion of the players and fan base. Go to any ball game and you find some old timers keeping track of each at bat with a pencil and paper, despite the fact that every measure has long been digitalized down to the decimal point. If you just want to see some guys smash into each other or forum real fast, all of this is meaningless baggage. But if you are interested in data and history, reading about the game and its players can be as much of a pastime as the game itself.
I happen to fall into the latter camp. I was reading about one particularly interesting aspect of baseball history when I came across this book: the knuckleball. The knuckleball has an almost mystical aura, so much so that the men who have learned to use it are almost members of a secret society. In a league where the 100 mph fastball thrown with pinpoint precision is the platonic ideal, the knuckleball is an anomaly. It’s slow, inaccurate, and unpredictable, so much so that catchers have to practice catching it. The knuckleball’s cache lies in the fact that in a game where pattern recognition is everything, a certain degrees of randomness is an advantage. A knuckleball can move anywhere and any which way, and the average hitter simply doesn’t know how to respond.
This book, Ball Four, besides being seen as classic, is also an invaluable document of knuckleball pitching. In it Bouton documents his struggle with the Knuckle Goblin, a name I just made up for the force which rules whether a knuckleball will or won’t accomplish its goal. Bouton himself is constantly bewildered by what his chosen pitch decides to do. In a game so meticulously quantified and strategized, it’s things like the knuckleball that keep games from turning into a math equation.
Much praise has been lauded on this book as being the first of its kind, the first to break down the manicured artifice of the Major League player, the first to show what goes into the sausage so to speak. Though many are not keen to admit it, our sports are still a product for consumption, and the way that Bouton shows himself, his fellow players, and the league, isn’t flattering. You gotta admire the cahones on the guy: unlike lots of other tell alls, there is no anonymity granted here - he names names and shows receipts. It’s no surprise that he became persona non grata in the MLB after the book’s publication.
For works whose main attribute is being groundbreaking, it’s difficult to stand the test of time. What might have felt like revelations in Bouton’s time have long since permeated into the popular consciousness of how we view athletes in our culture. We no longer expect professional athletes to be upstanding role models, in fact we might anticipate the exact opposite. (I say that with no nostalgia- the point of Bouton’s book is that we never should have looked at our athletes that way ) Since the ground that was broken has long since be ground to dust, this book is robbed of a little bit of its power. There is also the question of Bouton’s prose - he was obviously a very good writer for being a baseball player, but that’s not a high standard. HIs prose is rather like his role in his team: respectable, hardworking, but not spectacular. This is a diary and feels like one.… (mer)