Baseball Ball Four

World Publishing Company, $6.95.

THE NEW YORK TIMES reports the Marines at Da Nang have been teaching the South Viet Namese baseball. The South Viet Namese have taken to the game with delight, just as the Japanese did during the occupation of their country. Baseball is the all-American game for the all-American world.

According to the mythology lovingly fostered by the owners of baseball, the game is filled with clean cut boys from towns like Commerce, Oklahoma and Wampum, Pennsylvania who say "aw shucks" a lot, are grateful for the chance to play ball for all the nice folks in the stands, and, if they have the time, are also lay preachers for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. It's a wonderful world, baseball, full of unspoiled heroes and magnanimous owners and a pantheon of Gods whose names are Ruth and DiMaggio, Cobb and Williams, Musial and Wagner. Jim Bouton, like most American boys, believed so much in the dream that he wanted to be a "big leaguer." Ball Four is the story of his experience with one American myth.

Jim Bouton, at age 22, was the finest young pitcher in baseball, a star on the '63 world champion New York Yankees. He wore his blonde hair short, and T.V. advertising executives begged for his services to plug their latest masculinity-producing hair tonics. Then two things happened to Jim Bouton: he lost his fastball, and the owners and other players discovered that he was a flake.

To be a flake in baseball is to be intelligent. A flake is someone who disturbs the status quo (i.c. an outside agitator). Suddenly the television producers were nowhere in sight, the owners treated Bouton not as a star but as a commodity, and he ended up in the minor leagues. Another forgotten man, another tax loss for the owners. But there were new stars, after all, to take his place in the firmament. Jim Bouton became a marginal ball-player, lingering in the lower minor leagues until baseball expanded in 1968 and his contract was picked up by the Seattle Pilots.

BALL FOUR is the story of Bouton's try for a comeback. But because Jim Bouton is a flake it is also much more. It is an account of chicanery on the part of the owners of stupidity on the part of the managerial staff, and of blindness among rank and file ball-players. Ball Four places the all-American game under the scrutinizing of an experienced eve and finds it a game played by men, not giants, Ball Four is also the best book ever written about baseball.

For his talent Bouton suffered the castigation of owners, of sportswriters, and of fellow ball-players. His career, seemingly on a comeback course. was shattered. This year he was unconditionally released by the Houston Astros. a team he had pitched brilliantly for the year before. What did Bouton say that was so shocking?

Well, basically he revealed the truth that many of us who have played baseball-even as kids-suspected all along; baseball players, like dentists, or doctors, or Presidents, are human. They enjoy ogling girls. They get drunk. Some of them are fascists, politically and personally. Owners cheat the ball-player on his way up and down. Mickey Mantle climbs up on the roof of a hotel to look up the dress of the girl in the building next door. Such things, under normal circumstances would humanize the hero, making him lovable if a bit eccentric. But they are also truths to which baseball would rather not admit. Bouton shows that baseball is a reflection of American life as it is today, funny, pathetic, victimizing, and still, despite everything, livable.

There, however, is the rub. Baseball is not supposed to contain any elements that might be construed as vices. On the contrary, the noble values that the country professes are supposed to be best exemplified in the national past-time. If Americans are supposedly perfect Christians, then the athlete must be the perfect perfect Christian. If we, in our national mythology, are supposed to be rugged, steely individuals battling the frontier for survival, then the match-up of pitcher and batter, catcher and base-runner, steely-eyed individuals all, is the nonviolent equivalent of the duel between sheriff and gunfighter. The language of sportswriting reflects the popular mythology well. Pitchers "tame" hitters, runners are cut down "stealing" bases, and a crucial is a "duel." But who can imagine a classic confrontation between an adulterous pitcher and a hung-over hitter? Or so the arguments against Bouton go.

THE MOST vicious attacks against Ball Four were leveled by the team owners. Bowie Kuhn, the baseball commissioner hired by the owners, dressed Bouton down in public. Auggie Busch, part-time beer baron and part-time baseball impresario, called the book a "disgrace." The reasons for the attack are unimportant. What matters is that one book could cause so many supposedly even-tempered men to exhibit a moral outrage unequalled since Carrie Nation smashed her first saloon.

What is the nature of Bouton's criticism? He points out that baseball players are little better than slaves. Highly-paid slaves, but slaves nonetheless. His descriptions of contract negotiations are episodes of high farce. An owner explains to Bouton how much he means to the club, and then asks if he would let that stand as his salary increase. Bouton balks, and the owner comes around to Bouton's figure. The tragedy, as Bouton points out, is that the ball-player with less education often lets the owner's gratitude suffice for a raise.

BOUTON does make an effort to place the game of baseball in a larger social context. According to the owner's canon, baseball is the place where racism, class inequality and other forms of discrimination do not exist. "You're all ball-players and you all put you're pants on one leg at a time." Branch Rickey told the Brooklyn Dodgers before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, and of course the ball-players responded with warmth and affection to their new "colored brother." Or so say the sportswriters and owners. Bouton, on the other hand, tells of Elston Howard, the beloved Yankee catcher, who was forced to undergo humiliation after humiliation of the part of his teammates. Elston Howard believed what the owners told him, thought that he was not so much the victim of racism as he was the victim of his own personality. So Howard started Tomming, and immediately became an example to other black ballplayers of what a "good nigger" was like.

The price you pay for being loved in baseball is the loss of individuality, Bouton states at one point, and, in Howard's case it was poignantly true. The stereotyping that goes on in baseball is again a reflection of the underbelly of the American dream, and Bouton understands that, and writes about his own submission to his managers and owners with wry understanding. Bouton kept his intelligence under wraps for a year, trying so hard to conform to standard opinions and life styles among players and managers that he even tried to like Fred Talbot, another cast-off pitcher of less than liberal opinion, who constantly sounded off about "sending the ???ers and the Commies and the Jews back to Africa." In the end, Bouton lost the battle. Finding it impossible to survive the humiliation he exploded at the owner of the Seattle ball-club. He was traded, and then, after the book came out, fired.

It was a large price to pay for telling the truth. We are better for having the book, but baseball is a lot worse off for having lost its most perceptive critic.