Dooley Womack, please report to Baltimore

Talk about coincidence - I'm re-reading "Ball Four" right now. I just passed where he finally got a start for the Pilots - and got "creamed". What an awesome, awesome book.

 

My thoughts exactly. When I first read the book, as a high-school kid, the jokes and the "beaver shooting" humor were what hooked me in.

Now, what stands out is that for all his wisecracks and jokes about Joe Schultz, Bouton really did love the game -- as the classic closing line to Ball Four attests:

"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."

 

Fuckshit.

 

I always used to enjoy that fact that during quiet study hall in junior high, I woudl read that book. I always felt like I was getting away with something by reading a book that had sexual overtones while in school.

 

Just remember - Baseball is an Ass.

 

I <i>loved</i> Ball Four. Don't know how many times I read it, or how many hundreds of times my friends and I traded lines from it. It rekindled my sagging interest in baseball, because it showed what things were really like instead of the sanitized, "Joe Doubles spent the afternoon at the kids' hospital" stuff that the club sold.

I still love Ball Four, and I thank Bouton and Len Shecter for it. But I have to admit that my perspective changed at least a bit after I got into the business and discovered that Mike Marshall was an Ass.

 

"Okay boys and girls, tomorrow is my 30th birthday and I'll be thirty years old. I don't feel like I'm third. I look like I'm in my early twenties and I feel like I'm in my early twenties. My arm, however, is over one hundred years old."

 

Hey Joe Morgan - what kind of curveball was that?