Stuff I like: Ball FourPart 5: The real taboo topics.

I've been reading online more stuff about Jim Bouton and his book Ball Four. There were a flurry of stories last year on the 40th anniversary, and apparently nearly all is forgiven. In a post script from 1980, Bouton said he was never invited to Old Timers games, but that has changed. Now, fans give him a rousing ovation. The main reasons for the decade or more of hard feelings stem from three things in the book, worse than the profanity or discussing sex and drugs.

1. Bouton writes about money. Back before free agency, the major leagues were willing to publicize how much they paid the superstars, so the $100,000 or more contracts given to the likes of Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle or Ted Williams were in the newspapers. They did not advertise how much they were paying everybody else, and the answer was "peanuts". Bouton always drove a hard bargain in negotiations, and even though he was a 20+ game winner on the perennial World Series participant New York Yankees, he never made more than $30,000, and by the end of his career, his salary was closer to $20,000. This was a good middle class salary in the late 1960s, but ballplayers often had to deal with moving expenses when traded, or maintaining a home for the family in some town away from where the club played. In the space of one season, Bouton has to move from Seattle to Vancouver to Seattle to Houston, with his family making two of those moves, then his wife and kids going to Michigan to live with family while he plays ball in Houston. Bouton claims some credit for swaying opinion towards the players in this era just before free agency becomes the law of the land, and he might very well have a point.

2. Superstars displayed in a negative light. You might think the story about Ted Williams in the batting cage doesn't show Ted at his best, but while it shows Williams as being somewhat vain, he had plenty to be vain about. No, the meanest stories Bouton tells are about the lack of hustle in superstars like Roger Maris and Carl Yazstremski, or the stunts Whitey Ford resorted to when his fastball wasn't as scary as it used to be. These were the things many ballplayers and sportswriters really objected to.

3. Bouton and authority. In Seattle, Bouton doesn't show much respect to his superiors, but the real problem for him is that he isn't getting straight answers or the information he needs to help the team more. In Houston, his attitude improves markedly. While Harry "The Hat" Walker has a reputation as a tough guy and a screamer, most of the stories he has about run-ins with Walker end with "You know what? Harry was right." Bouton actually does respect being treated like an adult, but that treatment was rare in the major leagues back in the day, and I'm not sure how prevalent it is now. The other coach he writes about with reverence is his old pitching coach Johnny Sain, once a star pitcher with the Boston Braves. Nearly every quote of Sain's is treated as a pearl of wisdom, and Bouton is always glad to talk to him and get his advice on situations Bouton faces as he makes the transition from fastball pitcher to knuckleball thrower.

In conclusion, I'm glad I returned to this book some 41 years after I read it first. While I don't think the obscenities will be as shocking to readers now as they were then, it's still a very entertaining book that does a great job of trapping a time and place very different from the 21st Century in a snapshot, a testament to Bouton's honesty, humor and innate skills as a writer.

Stuff I like: Ball FourPart 4: Sex, drugs and Jim Bouton.

Many people had written sports diaries before the publication of Ball Four, but Jim Bouton told a lot of truth about being on a ball club, and this pissed off sportswriters and the baseball establishment to no end. Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner of baseball when the book came out, was especially upset about sex stories that weren't really about sex and drug stories that were completely legal.

Lemme 'splain.

The Seattle Pilots, like sports organizations throughout recorded history, thought that making fun of homosexuality was the height of wit, so guys started kissing other guys when on the bus to a game or in the clubhouse. When it started, the perpetrator would put his hand over his intended's mouth and kiss the back of his own hand. Hilarity ensued. But later, guys stopped putting their hand on the other guy's face, so actual lips to face or lips to mouth action occurred, sometimes followed by fist to jaw action going in the other direction.

This deeply annoyed Bowie Kuhn.

Kuhn also was outraged by the idea that some guys came to the game still hung over and played, sometimes remarkably well.

Bouton also talks about real sex, though he doesn't name names much. He talks about the women who are available, known as Baseball Annies. He also talks about stewardesses, known as "stews". He says the stories are true. He also brings up a few fine points. Taking a Baseball Annie out for dinner and drinks is considered bad form, but it is fully expected if a ballplayer is hooking up with a stewardess. While someone had to be taking advantage of the Baseball Annies and the stews, Bouton snitches on no one.

The closest he gets to naming names is a practical joke where a paternity suit letter from a fake New York City law firm is sent to Fred Talbot, a guy Bouton kind of hates, and the guy goes into a serious funk. Bouton didn't do it, but everyone knew the letter was coming, except of course Talbot himself.

And then there's the drugs. Alcohol is completely accepted and provided after the game by the club, but the drugs whose legality are something of a gray area are amphetamines, known in the book as greenies. Some clubs provided them to the players free of charge. The clubs that didn't allegedly frowned upon them, but every club had a supplier, either a player or a guy on the coaching staff or clubhouse crew. Bouton writes that greenies are great. No one in the book is snitched as an abuser of alcohol or greenies. It's just relaxation and enhanced performance without consequence.

Forty years later, many in baseball have forgiven Bouton for his trangressions, and now that he is allowed to show up for Old Timers' games, the fans always give him a rousing ovation. But the greatest of his transgressions had nothing to do with sex or drugs, but instead the real taboo topics of sports: money, stardom and the chain of command.

More on that tomorrow in part 5.

Stuff I like: Ball FourPart 3: A short simple vignette. With obscenities.

A lot of the best stories in Ball Four are not the clever things Jim Bouton says (and he says several), but instead Bouton as reporter, re-telling the stories others tell him. Here are a few paragraphs that illustrate that point nicely.

In the bullpen tonight Jim Pagliaroni was telling us how Ted Williams, when he was still playing, would psyche himself up for a game during batting practice, usually early practice before the fans or reporters got there.

He'd go into the cage, wave his bat at the pitcher and start screaming at the top of his voice, "My name is Ted fucking Williams and I'm the greatest hitter in baseball."

He'd swing and hit a line drive.

"Jesus H. Christ himself couldn't get me out."

And he'd hit another.

Then he'd say, "Here comes Jim Bunning, Jim fucking Bunning and that little shit slider of his."

Wham!

"He doesn't really think he's gonna get me out with that shit."

Blam!

"I'm Ted fucking Williams!"

Sock!

Stuff I like: Ball FourPart 2: Jim Bouton and Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

It's the rare person that would put Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' famous book On Death and Dying together with Jim Bouton's baseball diary Ball Four. Doing searches on both Google and Bing for the two names together, the only things they have in common is their best known books were published only one year apart, 1969 and 1970 respectively, and both books made the list of Books of the Century published by the New York Public Library.

So, forty one years too late, let me be that rare person. Kubler-Ross should have read Ball Four and Bouton should certainly have read On Death and Dying, because they both could learn a thing or two.

"Did you hear who died today?" In baseball parlance, that meant somebody on a major league club got sent to the minors. Jim Bouton in spring training worries about this on a regular basis. He knows he's marginal, even on an expansion team, and every pitcher sent down to the minor league Vancouver Mounties means his head has been spared from the chopping block.

But being sent to the minors isn't really death because there are way too many resurrections. No, the beginning of the book deals with the death of Jim Bouton's fastball and Bouton going through the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Early in the book, he hopes his new pitch the knuckleball will be a strong set-up for his fastball, putting hitters off guard. Every once in a while, he writes that his arm feels like it did four years earlier when he was still a guy who blew the third strike past over-matched major leaguers. He looks at other pitchers and thinks he has to be better than them, especially Steve Barber who never gets and work and is always in the training room. His anger and depression are mainly focused on his immediate superiors, pitching coach Sal Maglie and manager Joe Schultz, neither of whom has Bouton's complete confidence or respect.

Though he isn't cut in spring training, a few weeks into the season, Bouton "dies" and is sent to Vancouver. There he has success with the knuckleball, and finally he finds acceptance. His fastball is dead. He is a knuckleball pitcher, hoping to emulate the success of Phil Niekro and Hoyt Wilhelm. Someone tells him his knuckler moves faster than Wilhelm's, and he credits his old fastball technique for the difference, though he knows throwing a real fast ball hurts like hell and the knuckler takes almost nothing out of his arm.

The change in Bouton's attitude from the beginning of spring training to the time he is resurrected to the big leagues is remarkable, and the five stages of grief can be seen touching all the bases.

Stuff I like: Ball FourPart 1: Introduction.

I've been doing a lot of review recently, watching movies and TV shows I liked when I was younger, re-reading favorite books. This week, I was able to get Ball Four by Jim Bouton out of the Oakland Public Library, opening the pages again forty one years after it was first published. It was a must-read book for any teenage boy in 1970 who liked sports even a little bit. Two friends of mine from high school, Andy and Steve, sometimes check in on the blog. They both read it back in the day. We talked about it for weeks. I would overhear conversations in the hall and on the school bus between guys I barely knew, and I'd hear them repeat stories and jokes from the book. We didn't use the phrase "water cooler material" back then, but that's what Ball Four was for adolescent males in 1970, provided your parents let you read it.

The book is the diary of Jim Bouton recounting his 1969 season playing for several teams, both in the majors and in the minors. Sports diaries had been published before, but Ball Four was significantly different in two major ways.

1. Bouton had been a top pitcher for the Yankees, but when this book is written, he is nearly washed up and struggling to make the club on The Seattle Pilots, a first year expansion team. (The team didn't work out in Seattle and move to Milwaukee the next year, changing the name to the Brewers.) Most diaries before this were by stars or superstars on winning teams, often teams that won the pennant in the year in question.

2. Bouton told the truth. He told about all that he saw that he found interesting: the funny, the petty, the ridiculous, the crude. Like other adolescents loved Catcher in the Rye for its raw language, my friends and I loved Ball Four, not only for the jokes and new permutations of obscenities, but for the stories it told and the characters we met.

I'm only about a quarter of the way through, but it's a quick read and I should be finished soon enough, probably by the weekend. I can honestly say I am getting more out of it now with the gift of hindsight than I did when I first read it when it was fresh.

When I was a kid, I thought it was funny and I still do. This may be because my sense of humor is still at the stunted adolescent level, I can't be sure. Here's a way to test yourself. Sing the following lyric.

Summertime.... and your mother is easy.

If you laughed at that, you'll laugh at Ball Four.

But the big thing is that when I was a kid reading about the escapades Bouton the adult and his teammates, the emotional tug wasn't the same as it is now that I'm a man far past the age of thinking about breaking into the majors, reading the words of a man in the twilight of his career.

In any case, get ready for about a week of posts about Ball Four, a honest book about flawed people, including the author, disguised as a filthy, funny book about sports.

Stuff I like: Still Bill

Of all the rags to riches stories in show business history, there may be none as remarkable as Bill Withers'. He was born in a West Virginia coal mining company town called Slab Fork. He was a stammerer and it made him shy, reticent to speak. He joined the Navy and when he got out, he worked at an aircraft company, installing toilets on 747s. At the age of 32, he had never been on stage professionally when he decided to take some of his songs into a studio to make a demo tape.

Sussex Records heard his demo and signed him. Booker T. Jones produced his first album, which included the breakout hit Ain't No Sunshine and Withers' personal favorite, Grandma's Hands. His second album included the number one hit Lean On Me and the top ten song Use Me. As a songwriter, he returned to the top of the charts in 1981 with Just the Two of Us, a huge success for Grover Washington, Jr.

The documentary Still Bill takes a look at his life now. He's 70 and he's been away from the music business for a very long time. There's a famous quote from Elvis Presley after he left the Army and some female reporter asked him if things had gotten back to normal yet.

"Ma'am, when things get back to normal, I'll be driving a truck."

Elvis only drove a truck for a few months before he became crazy famous. He got a small taste of "normal life" when he was drafted and served two years. Bill Withers saw "normal adult life" for over a decade before the first single on his first album became a monster hit. He never completely trusted the music industry, but thankfully his is not a story of riches going up in a puff of smoke. After he quit in 1985, he didn't tour or make any attempts to record new music. Bill had had enough, thank you very much.



The movie does a great job of showing Bill's relationships with friends and family and with his gifts as a songwriter. I didn't know much of his music other than the big hits, and I was pleasantly surprised how much good stuff he wrote. On the extras on the DVD, the Swell Season are among the acts who were part of a Bill Withers tribute concert in New York City, and they play a song of his off of +'Justments called Stories. I had never heard it before, but it's hauntingly beautiful. I'm using the lyric from the bridge as my tagline right now, and I give you a link to Bill's original version, available on the You Tubes.

Matty Boy says check it out.

New music for old people: Raphael Saadiq

Raphael Saddiq is a veteran of the music business, getting his big break in Sheila E.'s band back in the 1980's when she toured with Prince, then founding his own bands Tony! Toni! Toné! and Lucy Pearl.

He released an album in 2002 called Instant Vintage, which describes his music pretty well. While the recording techniques may be modern, a lot of his songs would fit perfectly into the rotation of a soul music radio station in 1968.

The You Tubes are being fussy about embedding videos, so instead I offer a link to his new single Heart Attack, which has kind of a Sly Stone/James Brown vibe to it.

Matty Boy says check it out.

Stuff I like: J.G. Thirlwell.

I really like The Venture Brothers cartoons for a lot of reasons, but the music of J.G. Thirlwell makes the show many times better than it would be without it.

I estimate it at half a jillion times better. More or less.

Here's his orchestra Steroid Maximus playing a medley of Venture Brothers themes live.

Feel the awesome.

Steroid Maximus_Venture Bros Medley from JG Thirlwell on Vimeo.

Looking to honor the dead, instead I pay tribute to the living.

Ferlin Husky died this week. I felt like I should know more about Ferlin Husky, and so like when Charlie Louvin died, I went to The You Tubes to look up the best work of Ferlin Husky.

I gotta say it. His name and his hairdo were better than his singing or his choices of songs. His biggest hit was Wings of a Dove. It's bad form to speak ill of the dead but... meh.

He did record Mountain of Love, which was written and originally recorded by Howard Dorman in 1960.



I love Mountain of Love, but if I was going to recommend one recording, it would be the Top Ten version from Johnny Rivers.

Let us now spare a thought for Johnny Rivers. He will likely never be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, though he deeply deserves it. Born John Ramistella in New York City but raised in Baton Rouge, young Johnny played in a trio with his dad and his uncle. The DJ Alan Freed recommended he find a less ethnic name and he became Johnny Rivers, the main river being the Mississippi, with a little help from the Hudson.

Rivers could record anything, from country stuff like Mountain of Love to covers of R&B like The Seventh Son by Willie Dixon and soul classics like The Four Tops' Baby I Need Your Loving and Smokey Robinson's Tracks of My Tears. He also made a big hit out of Secret Agent Man.



Here's Johnny Rivers' original stereo version of Mountain of Love. If you know enough music theory, you know this song's great strength is the use of the triplet. If you don't that much music theory, just get up and dance. It's got a helluva beat.




And if I'm going to give a salute to Johnny Rivers, it would be just dead wrong not to include his greatest hit, a song he wrote with Jerry Adler called The Poor Side of Town. They called his genre The Go-Go Sound, and while it's very poppy and lushly produced, Johnny had himself one hell of a lot of soul.

Best wishes to Johnny Rivers, his family and friends, from a fan.

Stuff I like:Scrabble

For some time now, I have been in need of a hobby that would get me out of the house. I like to play a lot of board games, but several of my board game playing buddies have moved away and those that are still around don't get together as often as we used to. I watch the documentary Word Wars a while back, and though it was obvious professional Scrabble was no way to make a living, I decided to give Scrabble as a hobby a try.

I bought the game to play on my computer a while back, and today I went for the first time to the Oakland Scrabble Club, which meets at the game store It's Your Move up on Telegraph in the Temescal district, an easy walk from the MacArthur BART station. I was greeted by a very nice lady named Cynthia, who runs the club both because she is president and a natural born queen bee. She very cheerfully and helpfully beat me like a red-headed stepchild while keeping track of all the other games being played, correctly answering any and all questions about challenges of possibly fake words (known as phonies by the hardcore Scrabble players), while casually clearing her rack twice (known as a bingo) to easily outpace me, though I did get both blank tiles in my rack at the same time and hoarded them until I could make a bingo of my own. After our game was over, she told me I had potential and needed to have the two and three letter words down pat, as well as the ways to add to two letter words to make three letter words and the ways to make the three letter words into four letter words.

So that's my homework assignment.

After our game was over, another newby came in, an attractive young lady named Shea whom I played twice, winning both games. In my first three games, I went 2-1 with an average score of 317 (not great, not completely sucky either) and had outscored my opponents by 74 points overall. I had fun and I will definitely go to the Oakland Scrabble Club again.

If you like the game, the club meets on the 1st, 3rd and 5th Saturdays of the month. It's easy to find an opponent and the store is a nice environment. There are also plenty of good places to grab a bite nearby afterwards.

If you are an East Bay person like me who likes games, Matty Boy says check it out.

Stuff I like:People admitting they have a problem.

Dana Milbank writes for the Washington Post. He's not my favorite writer there. I like Eugene Robinson more. But still, he did something this week that makes sense.

There's this woman on the national scene. She was a vice-presidential candidate and her ticket got beat like a red-headed stepchild. She was governor of a very sparsely populated state for a while, but she quit that job because some folks waved a lot of money in her face.

I think we know who I'm referring to, right?

Well, Mr. Milbank admits he is tired of hearing about her and realizes he is part of the problem. He has promised that he will not mention her in his column or on his blog for the month of February. Ross Douthat, a conservative writer at the New York Times, is also tired of her, but annoyed more in the fact the press treats her like the only important conservative voice, which she most certainly is not. So according to Milbank, Douthat will join him in the month long pledge.

I'm making the pledge here on this blog. On The Other Blog, I admit I'm powerless to choose what I write about, since I promise to report on the headlines on the covers of the supermarket gossip rags, and currently the National Enquirer and some of its sister publications in the AMI kennel are going after the half term governor and her husband, who according to Enquirer has a hooker problem.

This could work. If people stopped treating her tweets and Facebook posts like they were national news, they wouldn't be national news. I also promise not to comment on any posts about her in February on political websites like the Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo. It is a mighty temptation, but I can take strength in the fact that February is the shortest month of the year.

Blogging comrades, please consider this moratorium yourself. Case in point: that Plumber fellow. You know the one I'm talking about. It took months and months for the media to finally figure out he didn't amount to a hill of beans, but now he is back to being a private citizen to whom the press pays no mind, like Condoleezza Rice or Larry Craig or Lisa Kudrow.

I know you can do this, comrades. As we know, the first step is admitting you have a problem.

p.s. If you have the time, go on over to The Other Blog and click on some ads. There's only one day left in the month and I'm close to going over $100, but I need a strong day tomorrow (Monday).

Stuff I like:Zodiac

I have now seen the movie Zodiac four times. I saw it in the theater, I rented it twice from Netflix and I now own my own copy. It may very well be my favorite movie made this century so far.

People from Northern California of my age will certainly remember at least some of the events the movie is based upon. Some guy calling himself Zodiac took credit for multiple murders in Northern California starting in the late 1960s and continuing into the 1970s. He wrote letters to the local papers, most notably the San Francisco Chronicle, and the papers published his letters and the cryptograms he included. The murders he took credit for did not all have the same modus operandi and forensic science of the time is like the Stone Age compared to today, so even the best evidence the police had was circumstantial and the leads supplied by the public largely useless.

The movie has re-enactments of a few of the crimes Zodiac took credit for, but the bulk of the film is about the investigation, some from the point of view of the police and a lot from the point of view of Robert Graysmith, a political cartoonist for the Chronicle who became obsessed with the case, played in the film by Jake Gyllenhaal in one of the best performances of his career. The few gory scenes didn't bother me that much, and I usually have a very low tolerance for that kind of thing. It's the investigation that makes the movie fascinating. Again, being from Northern California, I already knew before I saw the movie that there was never an arrest or conviction for any of Zodiac's crimes, so each time a new name is brought forward as a suspect, you don't know how much credit to give the evidence the film brings forward.


Here is a picture from what may be the best scene in the film. Three detectives interview a worker at a refinery. From left to right, Elias Koteas plays Detective Mulanax from Vallejo, Anthony Edwards and Mark Ruffalo are the detective partners Bill Armstrong and David Toschi from San Francisco and John Carroll Lynch plays a "person of interest" named Arthur Leigh Allen. Of these actors, only Ruffalo can be considered a movie star. The rest of the guys are just working actors, but they are all pitch perfect, completely believable and wonderful at delivering the building suspense. I mean it as a compliment when I say that all of them are better at listening and reacting than they are at delivering lines, and they are perfectly competent at delivering lines.

The movie is played very low-key with the exception of Robert Downey, Jr. as the reporter Paul Avery, but his flourishes of flamboyance are completely in character. The cast is good up and down the line and the story is really about the victims of the investigation more than the victims of the murderer. It is directed by David Fincher, who also directed, Se7en, Panic Room, Fight Club and this year's Oscar nominated The Social Network. Those are all interesting movies in their own right, but if I was to introduce someone to Fincher's, I would absolutely start them out with Zodiac.

Matty Boy says check it out.

Stuff I like:Dreams for teens from long ago.

During the Bush Administration, the blogger formerly known as Princess Sparkle Pony gushed like a schoolgirl over the fashion choices of Condoleezza Rice, with the usually clear subtext of mocking her complete lack of success as a diplomat. When the administration changed, the blog lost steam and the Princess retired, much to the sadness of her many fans, but eventually returned, under a new nom de blog Peteykins (always a male, just pretending to be a schoolgirl, not unique on the Internets) and with a more personal and eclectic direction.

One of my favorite features of the new blog is Book Shelf, where Peteykins dusts off some odd piece of pop culture he saved and scans it for all his fans to see. His collection of the pop music fan magazine 16 Magazine is by no means complete, but each one is like a moment in time captured in amber. 16 was aimed at girl fans of music, but the dreamy guys featured in the photo spreads were sometimes actors, like David Selby and Christopher Pennock featured here, stars on the gothic horror soap opera Dark Shadows.

Teen girls getting all excited about vampires! Who knew?

As fellow Sparkle Pony commenter Lulu Maude wrote, the magazine would have been more accurately called 11 Magazine, and of course the genre is not completely gone. (Simple celebrity math: Justin Bieber = Donny Osmond + Time Machine.) For someone my age or even possibly younger, the nostalgic pull is terrific and when you click on the scans, they blow up to a large enough size to read the text or enjoy the pictures more completely.

I've written it before and will likely write it again. If you read my blog but do not read Princess Sparkle Pony, you are only cheating yourself.

'Cos it's Stuff I Like.

Stuff I like:Clare Dowling teaches you reggae.

Not everything on the You Tubes is cute cats, music downloaded without copyright and football players wiping boogers on teammate's uniforms.

There's also... wait a second, I'm sure there's something else.

Oh yeah! There's Clare Dowling teaching you how to play reggae guitar!



Young Clare comes from the reggae hotspot of Huddersfield, England. If you go to her You Tubes channel, you can also watch her busking on the winter streets, giving the beautiful and possibly sloshed young people a reason to dance in the streets.

I love how self-possessed and generous she is. Matty Boy says check it out.

For that which was lost has been returned to me.

I can smell again!

(This is a good thing.)

This latest cold/flu/whatever hit me much harder than anything has hit me for a while, and for the first time I can remember I could not smell a thing. Ammonia, vinegar, fried food, absolutely no sensation whatsoever. It's like watching a movie with sound off or switching from digital TV to an old black and white.

Very disconcerting.

I decided early on to get cold medicine that promised not to knock me out, but after going for days without the sense of smell and not having to teach until Monday, I decided this weekend to bring out the big guns and got some generic stuff with Sudafed in it.

That did the trick.

And to show my gratitude to the Powers That Be, which in this particular case is modern medical science, I am going to dedicate this week on Lotsa 'Splainin' 2 Do to Stuff I Like.

And so it is written and so it shall be done.