I told Bob you’re perfect - it’s a guy who kills his wife and runs to Mexico.

Stacy Keach got sick and can’t play this role. ‘I’m here in California and we’re on the phone with Bob Altman. Dick Young, a Hall of Fame baseball columnist for the New York Daily News, called Bouton “a social leper” for naming names and breaking the code of silence rampant in sports media at the time.īut when Ball Four was first released in summer 1970, it quickly sold 200,000 copies in hardcover and generated some glowing reviews that praised the author for providing insight into the physical and mental tolls professional athletes experience. I’d call Shecter and say, ‘Is this interesting?’ And he’d say: ‘Are you kidding? Keep going!’ “īaseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn publicly rebuked Bouton, demanding that he renounce the book as fiction. Every once in a while, I would transfer the notes to audio and send in my tapes. “I didn’t know the value of it,” Bouton told The New York Times in 2017. In 1969, while pitching for the expansion Seattle Pilots and the Houston Astros, he began the process of chronicling conversations he’d had and scenes he had witnessed.Įxcerpts were initially released in Look magazine, generating fierce reactions from players, management and other sportswriters who vilified Bouton and Shecter for rendering an honest account of behavior that went on beyond the baseball diamond.īy detailing amphetamines use, alcoholism and sexual hijinks on the Yankees and other teams, Ball Four represented the first attempt to pull back the curtain on the seamy side of professional sports. Bouton was nearing the end of his major-league career when sportswriter Leonard Shecter convinced him to start a season-long diary on life in the big leagues.

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