On his high school junior varsity baseball team his nickname was "Warm Up Bouton" because all Jim Bouton ever did was warm up, he never got into the games. The goal of becoming a major league pitcher was "unrealistic" so he did his Career Week essay on becoming a forest ranger.
People are still having trouble predicting what Jim Bouton might do next.
In 1963 Jim Bouton won 21 games for the New York Yankees and made the all star team. In 1964 he won 18 games and beat the Cardinals twice in the World Series. In 1969 he wrote Ball Four, the funny, controversial, all time bestseller that revealed baseball players as human beings. Ball Four was recently selected by the New York Public Library as one of the "Books of the Century." The latest update, titled Ball Four: The Final Pitch, is now entertaining a new generation.
In 1970 Jim Bouton retired from baseball and became a television sportscaster in New York where he helped WABC TV and then WCBS TV climb to 1st place in the ratings. During the '70s he wrote a sequel to Ball Four entitled I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally, earned good reviews in a Robert Altman movie, The Long Goodbye, and created, wrote and acted in a CBS TV sitcom based on his book.
In 1978 Jim Bouton made a comeback to baseball with the Atlanta Braves. Gambling his television career for a dream, Bouton rode hot buses and ate cold hamburgers for two years in the minor leagues before he was called up by the Atlanta Braves. When the 39 year old knuckleballer beat the San Francisco Giants 4 to 1, it was his first major league win in eight years.
During his comeback, Jim Bouton helped create Big League Chew, shredded bubble gum in a pouch, so ballplayers could look right without getting sick. Big League Chew, introduced in 1980, has replaced chewing tobacco at many high schools and colleges.
In 1996 Jim Bouton received the highest honor of his career when he was featured in The Sports 100, "The One Hundred Most Important People in American Sports History," published by Macmillan. This book, which covers 150 years, has only 21 people from the world of baseball. In 1997 Bouton wrote his first novel, Strike Zone.
In 1998, after 28 years, Jim Bouton was finally invited to Old Timers' Day at Yankee Stadium when his son Michael wrote a letter to The New York Times, saying the Yankees should forgive his dad for having written Ball Four.
- Speech Topics
- Get into the Fun of Enterprise
- The Challenge of Long Odds
- The Satisfaction in Details
- The Thrill of Extraordinary Effort