Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original by Mitchell Nathanson (review)

On a number of levels Mitch Nathanson’s latest biography more than illustrates the aptness of Jerome Holtzman’s take that Ball Four was “the funniest baseball since Ring Lardner” (162). While reading about the life of the journeyman pitcher who broke open the vault of the game’s inner-most sanctum and yet remained an outsider for most of his life, I was struck by how much Bouton embodied the cultural figure of the Busher. Further, Nathanson’s masterful telling helped elucidate key elements of what makes the Busher an American original as well as a baseball original, namely the spirit behind Bouton’s business card from fourth grade: “You name it, we’ll do it” (6).

The Busher figure was a prominent character in baseball fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Young players were first promulgated in the press when spring training practices were changed so that only the recruits who had been signed the previous fall were available as subjects for the sportswriters until the veteran players arrived two weeks into camp. These young players then found their way into the short stories of Charles Van Loan, Ring Lardner, and other sports journalists turned fiction writers who emphasized their brash, over-confident, loud, indecorous, I’ll-do-it-my-way attitudes—all elements that were very much in Jim Bouton’s nature, as shown in Nathanson’s book. When Ring Lardner penned the first piece of baseball literature, he humanized the Busher and accomplished what both Bouton and Nathanson achieved: walking the fine line between revealing frailties and simply dishing dirt and complaining (196).

Nathanson’s portrayal shows how Bouton could have been a model for Henry Wiggen, Mark Harris’s Busher who tells his own story in a series of baseball novels, beginning with The Southpaw (1953). Both Henry and Jim were twenty-game winners (31). No one expected either to make the big club, which in Henry’s case was the Yankees-inspired New York Mammoths (37). Both brought an “everyman spirit” to their prestigious clubs (41). Both were go-to players for the sportswriters because they would readily speak to the press (52). Both were contract holdouts (66). Both damaged their team’s brands by appearing on variety shows (78). Both made comebacks at advanced ages: Jim with the Braves in 1978 at age thirty-nine and Henry somewhere near forty in Harris’s fourth and last book in the series It Looked Like For Ever (1979), which might have been inspired by Bouton.

Underneath all these similarities, it is the Busher’s quality as social “other” that defines him and fuels his need to prove himself at every turn, as Nathanson claims Bouton did (8). While the earliest Bushers served as prankster’s targets, Henry Wiggen and Jim Bouton became the originators of the gags as they challenged organized baseball’s authority, transforming themselves into “others” in the “bunker mentality of the clubhouse” (103). One could even argue that the aloneness and inability of Jim Bouton to fit in is what Henry Wiggen suffers from in all four of Harris’s books (145). Further, both of them are “Holden Caulfield-like” in that they want to function in the adult world at times and want nothing to do with that world at other times (146).

Perhaps the most defining element of the Busher that Nathanson’s portrayal of Jim Bouton revealed was his indomitable spirit, first evidenced, as mentioned above, in Bouton’s early entrepreneurial efforts—complete with Busher-like comma splice (6). Quite simply, Bouton never took “no” for an answer. He trusted his wits to figure out a solution to every problem he encountered, whether it was injuries that he overcame by reinventing himself as a knuckleball pitcher or managing the illness that ultimately took his life. An American boy to the end, Bouton believed in himself and did things his way without apologizing, just as Lardner’s Bushers never...