Bouton was haunted by self-doubt, as he tried to hold on to his big-league dreams. “Ball Four’’ becomes, in these moments, a book of poignant self-reckoning and a love story about baseball itself. Bouton was sent to the minor leagues, then traded to another second-division team, the Houston Astros. ‘‘Give him some low smoke and we’ll go and pound some Budweiser.’’Īs the season wore on, Mr. When Schultz visited the mound, a pitcher asked for advice on how to approach the next hitter. The Seattle Pilots, a hapless expansion franchise that became the Milwaukee Brewers in 1970, were populated by interesting oddballs - some superstitious, some cerebral - and led by an affably profane manager, Joe Schultz, whose all-purpose prescription for any problem on or off the field was to ‘‘pound that Budweiser.’’
But at its heart, ‘‘Ball Four’’ is a comic view of the life of a lousy team. Bouton exposed other unsavory baseball secrets, writing that Yankee pitcher Whitey Ford routinely scuffed the baseball to make his pitches more deceptive. ‘‘I remember saying to myself, ‘So this is the big leagues.’’’ ‘‘One of the first big thrills I had with the Yankees was joining about half the club on the roof of the Shoreham at two-thirty in the morning,’’ Mr. Washington’s Shoreham Hotel was a particularly choice location. Mantle and other players devised elaborate ways of spying on women, including drilling holes in dugout walls and crawling across rooftops to peep through hotel windows.
He added that the oft-injured Mantle sometimes played while nursing a hangover. ‘‘I’ve seen him close a bus window on kids trying to get his autograph,’’ Mr. Bouton’s most scandalous revelations concerned his former team, including Yankee superstar Mickey Mantle, who could be churlish and mean behind his country-boy grin.
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