Ball Four Quotes

“It never hurts to apologize, especially if you don't mean it.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“I can still remember Pete Rose, on the top step of the dugout screaming, “Fuck you, Shakespeare.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“The day he is out of baseball will be the day he starts to think about what comes next. By then, it may be too late.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“The older they get, the better they get when they were younger”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Pete Rose gets banned for life for gambling while the drug addicts are allowed back after a year; and then they get extra chances after that. Baseball is saying, in effect, that gambling is worse than drugs. How do kids make sense out of that?”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“And I don’t like the Mantle who refused to sign baseballs in the clubhouse before the games. Everybody else had to sign, but Little Pete forged Mantle’s signature. So there are thousands of baseballs around the country that have been signed not by Mickey Mantle, but by Pete Previte.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Sometimes the bedsheet is a Confederate flag. I wonder how the Negro players feel about them. The worst part is that these things are hung by kids. Why the hell couldn’t they let that stuff die with their grandfathers? These are not rebels who want something new. These are rebels who want to bring back the old. Doug”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Religion is like baseball,” said Steve. “Great game, bad owners.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“I always tried to joke about it, saying they didn’t want me back because fans don’t like to see the old-timers strike out. They’re going to wait till I’m the oldest living Yankee; by the time I go back I won’t even know I’m there.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“As the best ballroom dancer to have pitched for the Yankees—as far as anyone knows—I’m often featured as Marge’s dance partner at local fund-raisers. I’m like the talking dog; it’s not that the dog speaks well, it’s that he speaks at all.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Television executives would want to rewrite Gone With The Wind. If they had The Old Man and The Sea, they’d say to the author, “Ernie, we love it. But the part about the fish is boring. And the man is too old. He should have a girlfriend.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Greg Goossen was doing his Casey Stengel imitation and he remembered the best thing the old man ever said about him. “We got a kid here named Goossen, twenty years old, and in ten years he’s got a chance to be thirty.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“A ten-year-old lad named Marvin Standifer wandered out of the stands and into the bullpen tonight and I grabbed him, put a warm-up jacket and a hat on him and sat him on the bench. All his friends lined the fence and said things like, “Hey, is Marvin going to get into the game?” and “Does Marvin get to keep the hat?” and “How come you let Marvin into the bullpen?” And all the time Marvin had this giant grin on his face. Of course, Eddie O’Brien said, “We have to get him out of here. We could get in trouble for that.” “Eddie, go sit down,” I said. “This kid’s got good stuff and we may need him later in the inning.” Eddie sat down. At the end of the inning I hoisted Marvin back into the stands. He’d had a big night.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“We’ll know better after this next series. The Baltimore Orioles are in town. Which reminds me of a cartoon I once saw. It showed a little boy forlornly carrying a glove and a bat over his shoulder. “How’d you do, son?” his father asks. “I had a no-hitter going until the big kids got out of school,” the kid says.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Greg Goossen: “Hey, does anybody here have any Aqua Velva?” Fred Talbot: “No, but I gotta take a shit, if that’ll help.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“I’ve had the feeling for some time now that Wayne Comer and I don’t get along. I can tell because every once in a while he says about me, “Get him the fuck out of here.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“What could be better than a Fourth of July doubleheader in Kansas City? Anything up to and including a kick in the ass.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“(for some reason, every time Rice came onto the field, somebody would holler, “What comes out of a Chinaman’s ass?”)”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“What job is that?” I said gently. “You haven’t got a job. All you do is go over to that ballbag and hand everybody a ball and then you sit there and watch the game. When the telephone rings you jump up and tell somebody to warm up. That’s your whole goddam job.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“A young girl asked one of the guys in the bullpen if he was married. “Yeah,” he said, “but I’m not a fanatic about it.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“He has two different hairpieces.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“The world doesn’t want to hear about labor pains,” Johnny Sain used to say. “It only wants to see the baby.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“So I’ve been tempted sometimes to say into a microphone that I feel I won tonight because I don’t believe in God. I mean, just for the sake of balance, to let the kids know that belief in a deity or “Pitching for the Master” is not one of the criteria for major-league success. But I guess I never will.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“There’s pettiness in baseball, and meanness and stupidity beyond belief, and everything else bad that you’ll find outside of baseball.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“I guess to really like baseball as a fan you’ve got to have some Richard Nixon in you.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“We agreed we’re both troubled by the stiff-minded emphasis on the flag that grips much of the country these days. A flag, after all, is still only a cloth symbol. You don’t show patriotism by showing blank-eyed love for a bit of cloth. And you can be deeply patriotic without covering your car with flag decals.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“I think we are all better off looking across at someone, rather than up. Sheldon Kopp, the author and psychologist, wrote, “There are no great men. If you have a hero, look again: you have diminished yourself in some way.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Being a professional athlete allows you to postpone your adulthood. You grow up in Hero World. Parents change the dinner schedule for you, teachers help with grades, coaches fawn over you, cops ask for an autograph and someone else buys the drinks. Or worse. As basketball great Bill Russell put it, “most professional athletes have been on scholarship since the third grade.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Baseball player’s description of Cincinnati: “Horseshit park, horseshit clubhouse, horseshit hotel, lots of movies, nice place to eat after the game, tough town to get laid in.” We had to wait for an hour-and-a-half at the airport because there were no taxis and our bus didn’t arrive on time. It was three in the morning, but that’s no excuse. And do you know that all you can hear at the Cincinnati airport at three in the morning are crickets? Goddam crickets? While we were standing there Larry Dierker said, “This city isn’t a completely lost cause. Look, they’ve got one of those computer IQ games.” So we walked over, dropped a couple of quarters in and discovered the machine was broken.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“On our trip from Atlanta to San Diego we had a stopover in Dallas at Love Field. There’s a huge statue of a Texas Ranger in the terminal and it’s inscribed: “One Riot, One Ranger.” It reminded me of an incident when I was playing baseball in Amarillo. There were about five or six players having a drink at a table in the middle of this large, well-lit bar, all of us over twenty-one. Suddenly, through the swinging doors—Old West fashion—come these four big Texans, ten-gallon hats, boots, spurs, six-shooters holstered at their sides, the works. They stopped and looked around and all of a sudden everybody in the place stopped talking. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them said, “All right, draw!” They spotted us ballplayers and sauntered over, all four of them, spurs jangling, boots creaking, all eyes on them. “Let me see your IDs, boys,” one of them says. I don’t know what got into me, but I had to say—I had to after that entrance—to these obvious Texas Rangers, “First I’d like to see your identification.” I said it loud. He rolled his eyes up into his head in exasperation and very slowly and reluctantly he reached for his wallet, opened it and showed me his badge and identification card. I gave them a good going over. I mean a 20-second check, looking at the photo and then up at him. Then I said, “He’s okay, men.” Then, of course, we all whipped out our IDs, which showed we were all over twenty-one, and the Texas Rangers turned around and walked out, creaking and jangling. We laughed about that for weeks. I find it curious that of all the things Dallas could have chosen to glorify in the airport, it chose law enforcement. The only thing I know about Dallas law enforcement is that its police department allowed a lynching to occur on national television. Maybe the statue should have been of a group of policemen at headquarters, with an inscription that read: “One Police Department, One Lynching.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four