Ball Four by Jim Bouton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

really, really enjoying this book so far

And I continued to enjoy it to the very end. I love Jim Bouton's wry humor, great intelligence, and savy baseball knowledge. It's a little hard to grasp the controversy that this book caused on its publication, since "tell-all" books that have followed this sports book gem have "told-more", but Bouton was a pioneer in sport honesty, in some ways he still is ahead of commercialized sports reporting, and as all pioneers have, he paid a price for being the first in a new land.

For example, he only recently has been invited back to Yankee Stadium for revealing, among other things, that Mickey Mantel drank alcohol, Roger Maris flipped off fans, and Hank Bauer was a very insecure manager.

I loved this work. I hope I can find a way to use exerpts in my teaching. This work holds up well to style analysis.

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