7/6/2023 0 Comments Jim bouton's ball fourHe signed "Ball Four" for our daughters, writing don't tell your daddy where you learned some bad words. His own family was blessed by adoption, and he encouraged our family. I got to know Jim a little interviewing him and in occasional phone calls. But readers, not just baseball fans, found he made the game lively, profane and engaging. They felt he violated the code of the locker room by telling stories about ballplayers pulling pranks, swearing, carousing and joking. A lot of baseball people didn't like Jim Bouton's diary of daily life playing for the new and now defunct Seattle Pilots, the minor league Vancouver Mounties and then the Houston Astros. "Ball Four" became a bestseller, a controversy and ultimately a classic. When the game is over, take a big bow on the mound in Yankee Stadium with 60,000 people cheering wildly, which I think is much like the dream of a lot of young fans. I dream my knuckleball is jumping around like a ping pong ball in the wind, Jim wrote. I'm 30 years old, and I have these dreams is how Jim Bouton opened his 1970 book "Ball Four," which a lot of young fans read under the covers by flashlight, laughing instead of sleeping and learning colorful new language.
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