Day 304, Quasi-Quarantine: Scandalous "Ball Four" Still Resonates After All These Years

"I can still remember Pete Rose, on the top step of the dugout screaming, 'Fuck you, Shakespeare.'"

Jim Bouton's ground-breaking "Ball Four" was written half a century ago, but still resonates with its "inside baseball" revelations of the depravity of professional athletes. 

"'What's the most difficult thing about playing major-league baseball?' And Mike Hegan said, 'Explaining to your wife why she needs a penicillin shot for your kidney infection.'"

The pitcher tries to position himself as apart from everything occurring in the book, but he must have been a participant, all the way down to "beaver shooting." So while Bouton comes across as hypocritical at times and it becomes kind of easy to see why he was unlikeable, there are moments when the author shares profound and insightful commentary on momentous social issues. 

Bouton tackles racism, faux patriotism, class warfare, war protests, and more. Some of his thoughts feel rather prescient to contemporary issues.

"We agreed we're both troubled by the stiff-minded emphasis on the flag that grips much of the country these days. A flag, after all, is still only a cloth symbol. You don't show patriotism by showing blank-eyed love for a bit of cloth.

"And you can be deeply patriotic without covering your car with flag decals."

"They have bedsheet banners in Atlanta too. They say REBEL. Sometimes the bedsheet is a Confederate flag. I wonder how the Negro players feel about them. The worst part is that these things are hung by kids. Why the hell couldn't they let that stuff die with their grandfathers? These are not rebels who want something new. These are rebels who want to bring back the old."

The book is rounded out by subsequent afterwords, each from another 10 years in the future. These add-ons reveal the struggles Bouton had with being baseball's black sheep, his impostor syndrome, and the depression he fought after the death of a child. 

He even tracks down former teammates to talk about life and weightier topics in retirement.

"'Religion is like baseball,' said Steve. 'Great game, bad owners.'"

While "Ball Four" is at times hilarious, revealing, and cringe-worthy, the book is less interesting than its author -- and his battles to find a fit in a sport that both obsessed and repelled him.

"That the real experience of baseball was the bus rides and the country ballparks and the chili at 3 a.m. with a bunch of guys chasing a dream."

"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."