He Would Not Say It Was A Lie
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Harrison McCorkle, via Facebook
The commissioner of baseball tried to make Jim Bouton say his own book was a lie.
Magazine excerpts appeared before the book even shipped, and on June 1, 1970, Bowie Kuhn summoned Bouton to his Manhattan office. Bouton showed up with Marvin Miller and Dick Moss from the players union, which was not what Kuhn had in mind. For close to two hours Kuhn pressed him to issue a public statement saying the stories were exaggerated or invented. Bouton would not do it. Kuhn told him to consider the meeting a warning. Miller asked what exactly the warning was against. Writing about baseball?
5 million copies
and the only sports title on the New York Public Library's Books of the Century list
No suspension came. Kuhn settled for a statement about his displeasure and left the rest to the sportswriters, who called Bouton a Judas, a Benedict Arnold, and a social leper. The San Diego Padres burned a copy in their clubhouse. The Yankees stopped inviting him to Old-Timers' Day and kept it up for 28 years, until his son Michael wrote a Father's Day piece in the New York Times in 1998, after Bouton's daughter Laurie was killed in a car accident.
All of it sold books. More than five million copies, and the New York Public Library later put Ball Four on its Books of the Century list, the only sports title on it. Bouton had written a diary about a knuckleballer hanging on with an expansion team in Seattle, and it turned out to be about work, and aging, and the men you spend your days with. David Halberstam said it was so deep in the American vein that it was not really a sports book at all.
