By TEDDY ALLEN/Designated Writers

When Jim Bouton passed away earlier this month at age 80, it closed the book on a life that opened a book for me.

I’ve read his Ball Four, one of the bestselling sports books ever, four or five times, the first time in the mid-’70s when I was in high school. I didn’t tell my parents.

Reading it again this summer. It came out in May of 1970 (I was late to the party) and detailed his 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots (yes, they had a team) and the Houston Astros. It was basically the first tell-all book—what goes on in the locker room, what players talk about in the dugout, that sort of thing.

Eye-opening. And hilarious. Because, as I later discovered, it’s real.

I read the updated Ball Five a few years later. And I read I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally and I Managed Good, But Boy Did They Play Bad. Proud I did. I have those on ice to read again.

But nothing could ever match Ball Four. It is as original as it gets.

Had it not been for Ball Four, most guys my age would not have ever heard of Bouton. He showed up with the New York Yankees in 1962 when we were being potty trained. (Some of us made it, some of us—not so much. You know who you are.) His hat flew off nearly every pitch and his teammates called him Bulldog. He won 21 games in 1963, got beat by Don Drysdale and the Dodgers 1-0 in Game 3 of the 1963 World Series, and won 18 games in 1964 and two games in that year’s Series against the Cardinals.

The Yankees lost both, then the franchise took a nosedive.

But hanging on with the Pilots (and then the Astros) in 1969, he found gold in a bunch of vets and young players who each had their own story, and a coaching staff that was gold for being funny, although it didn’t really intend to be. Lightning in a bottle.

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