In “Ball Four,” the pitch is a metaphor for Bouton’s view of himself as an eccentric member of a baseball society of conservative go-alongs, stubbornly following his own path and yet dependent on the whimsy of outside forces.

That pitch, which is optimally delivered with no spin, requires finesse, fingertip strength and a good deal of luck without spin, the ball is subject to the air currents on the way to the plate, causing it to move erratically, making it difficult for the hitter - not to mention the catcher and the umpire - to track, and just as difficult for the pitcher to control. “Ball Four,” published in 1970, reported on the selfishness, dopiness, childishness and meanspiritedness of young men often lionized for playing a boy’s game very well, and many readers saw it, approvingly or not, as a scandalous betrayal of the baseball clubhouse.īut the book, which was Bouton’s account of the 1969 baseball season, seven years after his big-league debut with the Yankees, had a larger narrative - namely, his attempt at age 30 to salvage a once-promising career by developing the game’s most peculiar and least predictable pitch: the knuckleball. Bouton had a stroke in 2012, and in 2017 revealed that he had cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a brain disease. His wife, Paula Kurman (who declined to identify his town of residence), said he died after a long struggle with vascular dementia. Jim Bouton, a pitcher of modest achievement but a celebrated iconoclast who left a lasting mark on baseball as the author of “Ball Four,” a raunchy, shrewd, irreverent - and best-selling - player’s diary that tainted the game’s wholesome image, died on Wednesday at his home in the Berkshires in Massachusetts.

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