Interview with Ball Four Author, Jim Bouton

All on the Field speaks with Jim Bouton, former Yankee knuckleballer and author of the best-selling book, Ball Four. Bouton weighs in on the legacy of his book, HGH and steroids, and the future of the knuckle ball.

Q: Jim, you're famous for writing Ball Four, but you're also the inventor of Big League Chew and the author of another book, Foul Ball. What are you up to these days?

I'm the commissioner of the Vintage Baseball Federation and we staged our first annual Northeast Regional Playoffs and Vintage Baseball World Series this summer in Westfield, Mass.

So this is an old-timers league then?

Yeah, it's baseball played [with] 19th century rules, uniforms, and equipment. It's a step back in time. We create a 19th century atmosphere with costumed actors and kids selling cracker jacks with newsboy caps and suspenders.

Ball Four is one of the best selling sports books of all time, but you didn't always get favorable reactions for having written it. What has the legacy of the book become, and how are you treated by the baseball establishment today?

Ball Four was originally given bad -- harsh reviews by Major League Baseball and a few players, and mostly sports writers that were upset that I had written about things that had never been written about before in sports. And so they were sort of angry that a baseball player of all people would cross the boundary line.

But once the book came out and people realized it wasn't a bad book about baseball -- it was a good book about baseball -- it was funny, made the players more human, more likable, and turned a lot of people onto baseball. It didn't turn anybody off.

But that was years ago, when it first came out in 1970. Since then, it's been recognized as a very good book about baseball. It was selected a few years ago by the New York Public Library as one of the most important books of the century.

I've updated it three times: 1980, 1990, and 2000. (The latest edition, Ball Four: The Final Pitch, can be found at Bouton's website).

You reference "greenies" several times in the book. How extensive was their use when you played? Did everybody use them?

I don't know, but in the book I asked Don Mincher how many guys are taking Greenies. I said "Fifty percent?" And he said, "Hell, way more than that." I would probably guess maybe 60 to 70 percent.

But you have to distinguish greenies -- the peptos as they were called -- from steroids. Greenies only allowed you to play up to your ability. If you didn't get a good night's sleep, or you had a hangover, it would allow you to play up to your ability, or at least some players thought that. It did not create a different human being. It did not change your physical makeup. It did not allow you to play beyond your ability, your normal ability as steroids do and as Human Growth Hormone does.

Are you saying, then, that greenies was pretty much the only substance of that nature that was floating around at that time?

That was the only substance players took that could be called a drug in any way.

As you mentioned, these days it's HGH and steroids that are all the buzz. How do you think the game evolved to this point where no slugger or power pitcher is immune from suspicion?

Baseball got itself into this position because it has refused to have a strong drug policy, and for that I blame the Players Association. They're very short-sighted. They elevated the players' rights to privacy above their rights to good health and fair competition. The Players Association should have protected the players who were not taking the drugs; even if most of the guys wanted them, the Players Association should have protected the non-users who have to compete against the users.

It's really not fair, is it?

No, it's not, and now you've got a bunch of records that are going to be hard to break. It's unfair from two levels: first of all, it's unfair to the records that were broken and were set by guys years ago who weren't on performance enhancing drugs. And now they're going to be broken in the future by guys who aren't going to be on performance enhancing drugs because they're going to have tougher drug laws.

So you're going to have a set of records that are going to be distorted and are going to be standing for longer than they should be.

So are you in the camp, then, that would go for asterisks attached to some of those records?

Yeah. A blue ribbon panel needs to be appointed and be given a launch budget and investigate just exactly what kind of impact steroids have on batting and pitching. And also [to determine] what period of time were they prevalent, and to what extent have they affected the numbers, the records.

This would be not a punitive thing; this would be investigatory simply to establish which records are legitimate and which ones are not. And then, they need to figure out where the impact is. If it's on home runs -- for example, 40 percent increase in home runs as a result of steroids -- they need to apply those numbers to the numbers that were actually hit so that next to the actual number of home runs hit, you'd have, in parentheses, a steroid adjusted number. I call it the S.A.N. It would sit there in parentheses next to the actual number hit.

[Jim goes into more detail at this point, but you can read more of his thoughts by clicking here].

Switching gears, Tim Wakefield is the only Major League pitcher that I know of still throwing the knuckle ball. Does he represent the end of an era, or does the knuckler have staying power?

There have never been more than a few knuckle ball pitchers at any given time; never more than two or three. In some years, there's only been one, so this is not unusual to have a lone knuckle ball pitcher.

There may not be too many more, however, because the knuckle ball takes a lot of patience and you have to throw it all the time. And you have to learn it as a kid, and I don't know if kids are willing to spend that kind of time learning a knuckle ball. They've got the computer, they're skateboarding, they've got all sorts of other things they're doing. Most of the guys that I know who threw the knuckle ball did nothing but play baseball when they were kids. That's all they did, all day long. They didn't have Little League even.

The advantage of that was you didn't just play between 3:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon with the parents and uniforms; you played when the sun came up and you went home when the sun went down. You played baseball all day long. It's all you played, all summer long. You don't have that anymore in America, which is why fewer and fewer players are American-born. Most of the new guys that are coming in, the really talented ball players, are the ones that are coming from the Dominican Republic, where they play baseball like they used to play in the US.

However, I do think that the knuckle ball is uniquely suited to the Asian culture because the knuckle ball is a pitch that requires a sort of letting go. You can't control it. You can't dominate it. You have to sort of let it go. It's like a Zen philosophy almost and requires incredible patience. So I can see very easily young Asian players spending enormous hours learning and perfecting the knuckle ball. I would not be surprise if there was a wave of Japanese knuckle ball players, Chinese knuckle ball players coming in because thousands of kids there have had the patience and the time to develop this pitch.

Who do you like for this year's World Series?

I haven't been following it that closely. I generally predict teams that I'm rooting for. I'd like to see Lou Piniella's Chicago Cubs in there, because Lou and I played ball together for awhile in spring training, I know him, and he's a nice guy. From the American League, Detroit. It would be nice to see a Detroit - Chicago World Series.