A Sad Chapter Ends For Bouton ‘Ball Four’ Author Will Wear Pinstripes After 28-Year Exile

Jim Bouton kept trying to convince himself that the cold war with the New York Yankees would end someday. He is blessed and cursed with a stubbornly optimistic streak. Besides, he couldn’t bear to consider the alternative.

Bouton is the author of “Ball Four,” not “Mein Kampf.” For nearly three decades, the Yankees have declined to draw a distinction. Bouton won 21 games for the Yankees in 1963 and 18 the next season. “Ball Four” went into print in 1970, and the Yankees went to great pains not to acknowledge Bouton’s existence after that.

“Jim who?” Mickey Mantle said in response to a book that dared mix some of the bad with the good. Nearly a quarter of a century passed before Mantle spoke to Bouton again. Bouton was easy enough for the old Yankees guard to avoid, because he never got invited back for Old-Timers’ Day.

“I thought eventually they were going to have to invite me,” Bouton said. “I was planning on being the oldest living Yankee. So at some point, at 89 … I was just thinking that when I finally show up, I might not even know I’m there.”

The wait of the world lifted from Bouton on July 15. The phone finally rang, and it was the Yankees. They invited him to be at Yankee Stadium on Saturday for Old-Timers’ Day. It took a lot of convincing before Bouton would allow himself to believe it was true.

“I’ve had people call me in the past saying, ‘This is George Steinbrenner; you’re coming back to the stadium,”’ Bouton said. “Friends of mine. Goofing.”

Bouton is 59, and he’ll be gratefully aware of his surroundings. He’ll know everything it took to make this possible, and he’ll probably have a good cry.

Again.

Without his father knowing it, Michael Bouton wrote a letter several weeks ago to The New York Times. Michael wrote the letter hoping that on Father’s Day, the newspaper might see fit to print at least excerpts of what he had to say about his father’s exile from anything having to do with the Yankees. Michael didn’t know if it would do any good, but he didn’t know what else to do. He did know there wasn’t much left to lose.

“Today is Father’s Day,” Michael began, “but the date I have circled on my calendar is July 25. That is Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium. Traditionally, it is the day when past Yankee stars take their annual curtain call. It is the day when my father, Jim Bouton, No. 56, the Bulldog, is snubbed, and not invited back. Although I know an invitation to attend Old-Timers’ Day is an honor he can live without, it is what I wish for him this year.”

These have been anguishing times for his family, Michael explained. Last August, his younger sister Laurie died in an auto accident. Old-Timers’ Day, Michael observed, is a day for families and fans to share special moments and memories together. If Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium had been on the Bouton calendar all these years, then maybe there would have been that many more days with Laurie.

With sadness, Michael wrote of the precious moments irretrievably lost from Yogi Berra’s refusal to come to Yankee Stadium as long as Steinbrenner owns the team. Michael pleaded with Steinbrenner for a truce. Couldn’t Steinbrenner see it in his heart to at least tolerate the presence of a 20-game-winner, turned-author, turned-outcast at an Old-Timers celebration?

“I see this as an opportunity to get my father some extra hugs at a time in his life when he could use all the hugs he can get,” Michael wrote in closing. “It is something he would never seek for himself - he is going to kill me when he reads this - and maybe the kind of thing only a son or daughter can do for their father.

“I am not asking for any favors, just reconsideration. That is all. Life is short. Time is at hand.”

Jim Bouton lives in North Egremont, Mass., so he heard those words before he saw them. His other son, David, read the letter to him over the phone.

“I was so moved, I can’t tell you,” Bouton said. “He was crying reading it to me, and I was crying listening to it. It was the most wonderful gift I’ve ever received.”

It is the gift that keeps giving. Because with healing comes the beginning of hope. Parents who have lost children need all the hope they can get. Laurie was 3 during the “Ball Four” season. She managed to get bitten by a dog, hit in the head by a flying can of peas (taking nine stitches) and cut her head on a jalousie before the end of spring training.

“The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” Bouton affectionately called her then and calls her now.

“This is not about me going back to Old-Timers’ Day as much as it’s about feeling the loss of Laurie and about Michael being able to make this happen by a letter,” Bouton said. “I don’t know where my own personal feelings about baseball leave off and my feelings about Laurie and Michael begin. It’s all mixed up in my mind.

“It’s all very emotional. I just feel like I’m turned upside down with such a terrible thing happening in the same frame as such a wonderful thing.”

Laurie Bouton died at age 31. When a diary of the 1969 season triggered an angry rumble through the baseball establishment, Jim Bouton was 31.

“It’s too long to be punished for something that really wasn’t a bad thing,” Bouton said. “I wrote it out of a deep sense of love. I wanted to share the fun that I’d had in baseball. There were a few tough truths in the interest of honesty, but it certainly was a very, very minor part of the book.”

From Bouton, fans learned that Mantle played with hangovers, Whitey Ford scuffed the baseball and Joe Pepitone had two hairpieces (one for games).

From Bouton, fans learned that players sometimes popped pep pills and took advantage of the opportunities offered from groupies. From Bouton, fans learned the lengths players would go (climbing hotel roofs, drilling holes in walls, sticking mirrors under doors) just to get a revealing look at a good-looking woman.

From Bouton, fans learned the depths to which management would sink to strong-arm players out of money.

From Bouton, fans learned that players were liable to do just about anything - including serve teammates with fake paternity suits - for a laugh.

From Bouton, fans learned how endearing and enraging and human players can be. The Roger Maris that Bouton knew was grumpy and money-conscious. The Elston Howard that Bouton knew had two faces. Still, Bouton saved his best sentence in “Ball Four” for last: “You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way all around.”

In the end, holding a grudge takes too much energy to do anybody any good. Shortly after Mantle’s son Billy died in 1994, Bouton sent a letter of condolence. Bouton wasn’t home when he received a return phone call from Mantle, who left a message on the answering machine. Bouton still treasures that recording, because Mantle assured him that he wasn’t the one standing in the way of an invitation to Yankee Stadium. Mantle died the following year.

Life is short. Time is at hand. So Michael Bouton decided to sit down and start writing, before it was too late.

“He was 6 when I started being ostracized from Yankee Stadium,” Bouton said. “Michael has lived with being the son of this pariah, and he has single-handedly turned it around. Talk about the pen being mightier than the sword.”