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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When Ball Four was first published in 1970, it ignited a firestorm of controversy. Bouton was called a Judas, a Benedict Arnold, and a "social leper" for having violated the "sanctity of the clubhouse." Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn attempted to force Bouton to sign a statement saying that the book wasn't true. Ballplayers, most of whom hadn't read the book, denounced it. The San Diego Padres burned a copy in the clubhouse. It was even banned by a few libraries.

Almost everyone else, however, loved Ball Four, and serious critics called it an important document. Fans liked discovering that the athletes they worshipped were real people. Historians understood the value of the book's depth and honesty.

Besides changing the public image of athletes, the book played a role in the economic revolution in professional sports. In 1975, Ball Four was accepted as legal evidence against the owners at the arbitration hearing which led to free agency in baseball and, by extension, in the other sports.

Today Ball Four has taken on another role as a time capsule of life in the sixties. "It is not just a diary of Bouton's 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houton Astros," says sportswriter Jim Caple. "It's a vibrant, funny, telling history of an era that seems even further away than three decades. To call it simply a 'tell-all book' is like describing The Grapes of Wrath as a book about harvesting in California.

SYNOPSIS

To commemorate its centennial, the New York Public Library created a Books of the Century collection, identifying works that played "defining roles" in the past 100 years. From the millions of books considered, Ball Four was selcted as the only sports book along with classics such as The Great Gatsby, Gone with the Wind, In Cold Blood, and Catch-22.

ACCREDITATION

In the 1960s Jim Bouton was an All-Star pitcher and a 20-game winner for the New York Yankees. In the 1970s he was a TV sportscaster, wrote a sequel to Ball Four entitled I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally, acted in a movie called The Long Goodbye, and made a brief comeback with the Atlanta Braves. His first novel, Strike Zone, co-written with Eliot Asinof, was published in 1994. Bouton, who is now a businessman and motivational speaker, lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Paula Kurman.