Whatever else you do or don't do about Mr. Jose Canseco's still-festering tome, please don't even think about comparing it — as only too many have, thus far — to Ball Four. "This," said a correspondent of mine about Juiced, "is like Ball Four. Ridiculed at the time, hailed in the future." It is like nothing of the sort.
I was there when Ball Four was first published, having read the book as a high school student in 1970. I read all the ridicule, the ridiculous, and the repugnant about that book. And I read the passages within the book that spoke of the legendary "greenies" — the amphetamines which some baseball players and other team sport athletes were gulping as often as they could get their hands upon them.
And would you like to know where the most uproar-cum-ridicule aimed when it came to Mr. Jim Bouton's opus?
It went to the passages that bespoke the frat-boy pranks and blunders. (My personal favorite: the goldfish slipped into the Seattle Pilots' bullpen's water cooler, said to have been slipped there by Baltimore Orioles relief pitchers Pete Richert and Eddie Watt.)
It went to those passages which revealed Mickey Mantle had what proved to be a fatal attraction to booze, when he wasn't leading beaver shooting (read: peeping Tom) expeditions up on the roof of the old Shoreham Hotel in Washington. ("I once told [my wife] that you could win a pennant with the guys who've been up on that roof," wrote Bouton.)
It went to those passages describing dumb jocko sex games on the team bus, including a player swooping unexpectedly on another particularly macho player and planting a wet one right smack on the kisser.
It went to those passages describing Joe Pepitone slinking into the trainer's room with a piece of popcorn under his foreskin, complaining about a new venereal disease with a straight face, holding his laughter until after the trainer popped out the popcorn with a pair of tweezers.
It went to those passages describing the paternity suit prank Seattle Pilots reserve catcher Merritt Ranew played on his roommate, pitcher Fred Talbot, who practically had coronary failure over it at first.
It went to those passages describing Dick Stuart's flagrant flouting of team rules when he was the prime time power swinger on the 1962-64 Boston Red Sox, and when he wasn't making pitcher Earl Wilson want to kill him over a couple of key errors — including spiking Wilson's foot on a play at first.
It went to those passages describing Roger Maris as a loafer. (Which should tell you exactly how well the Yankees did their self-appointed job of keeping secret the truth about Maris's mid-1960s injuries — the ones robbing him of much of his long-ball power, the ones the Yankees didn't want even him knowing because they needed him on field for marquee value as the team collapsed. Even his teammates, apparently, knew not the severity of those injuries.)
Among the more "serious" passages, said ridicule tended as a rule to go toward such passages as described the kind of underhanded contract negotiation tactics major leaguers endured in the pre-free agency days — tactics which helped provoke the forming of the Major League Baseball Players Association in the first place, including Ralph Houk's (when he was the Yankees' general manager) flagrant (and, as it happened, illegal) attempt to fine Bouton $100 a day for every day he held out for a raise before 1964.
Bowie Kuhn, then baseball commissioner, hauled Bouton into his office and all but demanded Bouton sign a formal statement disavowing Ball Four and blaming the whole megillah on his editor, former New York Post sportswriter and then-current Look sports editor, Leonard Shecter. Bouton didn't exactly demand but more or less suggested, implicitly, the orifice up which the commissioner could shove it.
"You've done the game a grave disservice. Saying Seattle players kissed on the team bus. Or that some of our greatest stars were drunk on the field. What could you have been thinking?" ("...drunk on the field" alludes, of course, to the long-famous anecdote of Mickey Mantle hauling his bat to the plate with a ferocious hangover, blasting one into the seats, and saying as he returned to the dugout, pointing to the cheering crowd, "Those people don't know how tough that really was.") That was the blurb from Bowie Kuhn that helped sell the first paperback edition of Ball Four.
Dick Young of the New York Daily News was polite and objective enough to call Bouton "a social leper" for having written and published Ball Four. (It was a subsequent amiable exchange between the two which provoked the title of Bouton's next book, in which he wrote of Ball Four's reception and consequences. Young acknowledged Bouton's civility by saying, "I'm glad you didn't take it personally" — and hence was the title. In some ways, I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally is even funnier than Ball Four. But only some.)
There are those who allege amphetamines to have "performance-enhancing" capabilities, too, although not quite the sort steroids are alleged to have. (The operative word, then and now: alleged capabilities. Proof, please. Thank you.) Not one syllable of the ridicule thrown upon Ball Four went even a thirty-second as much toward the stories of the greenies as went toward all the titillation.
Jim Bouton had just revealed a widespread-enough amphetamine presence in baseball — years before the infamous cocaine scandal of the early 1980s; decades before the incumbent steroids scandal — and most of the world was more outraged that he had exposed the lustful urges and lopsided economics enunciated behind 1960s clubhouse walls or aboard team buses than that he had exposed a presence of speed freaking behind those walls or aboard those buses.
Perhaps, too, it may have had something to do with the suggested salient reason for the greenies: keeping up the ol' energy over the long, long season. That didn't seem to offend 1969 readers the way the idea of "cheating" does 2005 readers. Readers who think there is something sinful about replenishing depleted muscle or body substance, which is precisely the reason Mark McGwire used something that was not a steroid. Readers who still do not get the idea that cheating in baseball, actual or alleged, did not begin when Jose Canseco first turned up in a major league clubhouse with a shot of Kickapoo Joy Juice loaded up his wazoo. (It didn't even begin when Babe Ruth hauled up to the plate with a bat made of four individual pieces of wood, a haul which helped provoke the American League's original rule against altered or doctored bats.)
"You spend a good part of your life gripping a baseball, and then it turns out that it was the other way around," Bouton wrote poetically enough to finish Ball Four. Based upon the excerpts I have seen — and the none-too-subtle backpedaling and flippy-floppy in Canseco's public comments since the pre-publication excerpts and post-60 Minutes — it would surprise me not to see for myself that Juiced ends with words to the effect of, "You spend a good part of your life whipping the living you-know-what out of a baseball, and then it turns out that you don't get no respect."
February 20, 2005
Eric Poole:
My sentiments exactly. Although I don’t remember first-hand the uproar that “Ball Four” caused (I was only 4 when it was published), it was also my recollection that the biggest controversy dealt with the dismantling of guys like Warren Spahn, Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford as sports deities.
Also, re. Jose Canseco’s book, I think it should be a law that you can’t write a book until you can prove you’ve read one.
However, even though Canseco himself is not credible, those claming that he is lying — McGwire and LaRussa, just to name two — are even less credible.
I tend to think most of his linking of the big names to steroid use are believable.
February 22, 2005
bill:
I imagine too, that Boutons motivation alone to write ‘Ball Four’ was much different than Canseco’s motive behind juiced. The titles alone say as much.