Rules for Baseball Radicals: How Jim Bouton and Ball Four Changed the Narrative of Baseball

The following are the first words on the first tape Jim Bouton recorded in February of 1969, documenting the comings and goings of the nascent Seattle Pilots:

What I thought I'd do is try to record every single night. Before I start talking, I'll put whatever the date is. I'll talk about what happened that particular day, and then when I'm done, I'll have a cut off period. Then I'll go into some background things on what other Spring Trainings have been like and that sort of thing. Today is the 28th. I didn't cut a tape on the 26th and 27th, but I made notes on the 26th.

First day. I got to the ballpark and went to Marvin Milke's [sic] office and shook hands and he asked me if I had a nice flight down. He said, there's been a lot of things said about the strike and I know you've said some things about the strike, but we are going to forget all that and start fresh. Everybody starts new down here. We have a new team and everyone is going to start with a clean slate. As far as I'm concerned, let bygones be bygones and whatever has been said in the past, I know I've said a lot of things, we'll forget all that and start fresh.

I felt like a former alcoholic who has been given another chance.¹

And so it began. Bouton would eventually compile fifteen tapes of thoughts and observations, then typed out by Elizabeth Rehm who worked for Lighthouse for the Blind, a nonprofit created to help train the visually impaired to become self-reliant. In all, the transcriptions totaled 1,091 double-spaced pages. After several drafts and revisions, it became Ball Four, an insidebaseball memoir like no other that was not only fun to read but would change the perception of the business of baseball forever.

While Bouton's book received its share of plaudits when it was released in 1970 and decades later², the work and the author haven't received proper credit for fundamentally changing the way fans and players understand the business of baseball. This article represents his biographer's meager attempt to rectify that injustice.

Although Bouton always claimed his motivation for writing Ball Four was to share the fun of being a big-league ballplayer, he did, at times, admit to a secondary goal: exposing to the public how those occupying the front office suites regularly heaped injustice on. In this he exceeded all expectations. He introduced fans to the cold and brutal treatment players experienced with regularity and the myriad ways general managers tricked players into accepting lowball contract offers. After Ball Four it was more difficult for fans to see the players as a privileged class than it had been before. The poor treatment documented within the book wouldn't, couldn't, last once exposed to the sun; five years later baseball's reserve system (which provided management with the lever to crush players as they had for a century) was functionally dismantled. Fittingly, and not coincidentally, Jim Bouton was not only present at the arbitration hearing that upended the balance of power inherent in the business of baseball but was one of only three players who testified to working conditions then present within Major League Baseball, and portions of Ball Four were read into the record.

This article is my effort to show how and why Jim Bouton (through Ball Four and elsewhere) was so successful in changing the narrative of the business of baseball, flipping it on its head. Sympathies which once ran overwhelmingly in management's direction suddenly rushed towards players, and players at last began to stand up and demand adequate compensation for their talents. To do so, the following several pages will examine Bouton's actions and rhetoric through the lens of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals,³ his 1971 tome (released only months after Ball Four) that summarized Alinsky...