“Ball Four Goes Hollywood”

When Jim Bouton’s book Ball Four hit bookshelves in 1970, it exploded myths, revealed secrets, and offered tales of baseball, theretofore kept protected from the public.  If reporters knew about Mickey Mantle’s alcohol problem, for example, they...

56 Games

Joe DiMaggio once declared, “I’d like to thank the good Lord for making me a Yankee.”  When the Yankee Clipper stepped into the batter’s box, denizens of the Bronx felt the same way. In May 1941, Americans watched the premiere of Orson...

The World of Howard Beale

In 1976, Americans were mad as hell.  And they didn’t want to take it anymore. The fury, of course, was depicted in an iconic scene from the movie Network.  Before FOX constituted a legitimate fourth television network in the 1980s, the triad of CBS, ABC, and...

Bouton, Baseball, and “Ball Four”

Jim Bouton peeled back the veneer protecting Major League Baseball in his 1970 exposé, Ball Four. It reads like a friend sharing secrets with you over a couple of beers at a baseball game. Bouton, a quasi-phenom pitcher in the early 1960s with the New York Yankees, he...