An important date in “Ball Four”
The March 19 entry from Jim Bouton’s 1970 baseball tell-all is where readers learn how to swear, Joe Schultz-style.
The Seattle Pilots manager would make a compound cuss word out of the two most common four-letter expressions. Sometimes the resulting eight-letter word would start with an “s” and sometimes “f” would be the first letter.
According to Bouton, Schultz said it a lot.
After “Ball Four” had been out a while, so did half the guys I knew.
* This story was originally published as a post from the blog "The Slice." Read all stories from this blog