An overlooked obituary of a former star athlete appeared this week, the passing for ex-Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton, who wrote a controversial book, Ball Four. His 1970 best-seller did not go over too well in the "baseball community" shall we say because it revealed players carousing with women, including Yankees iconic star Mickey Mantle, and using illegal stimulants, and he immediately became the proverbial pariah with players and executives--imagine that! Bouton played for nine seasons from 1962 to 1970, seven of those with the Yankees, and then returned for a 10th and final season in 1978 with the Atlanta Braves. That is when I met Jim Bouton personally and got to know him on a one-on-one basis. Jim Bouton came to Savannah and took up residence at Tybee. The reason he came to town was because of his attempted comeback with the Braves they brought him here to Savannah to "warm up" with our then-Double A farm club, the Savannah Braves (also owned personally by Ted Turner).
During his time pitching and living here I was a young sportscaster at WJCL-TV and was always covering the Braves and consequently, Bouton. His comeback was also covered on a national level as well because of the controversy and that he had lived and worked in New York and for awhile had done sportscasting at the ABC flagship WABC and later the CBS flagship station WCBS. And in his day, Bouton was an outstanding pitcher known for his tenacity acquiring the nickname "Bulldog." (No wonder he came to Georgia!). He had an outstanding fastball and Bouton won both his starts in the 1964 World Series beating the St. Louis Cardinals 2-1 with a complete-game six-hitter on October 10th on a walk-off home run by Mickey Mangle, then won again on October 14th at Busch Stadium 8-3 backed by another Mantle homer and a Joe Pepitone grand slam. But an arm injury in 1965 slowed that fastball down and he was relegated mostly to bullpen duty. But his knuckleball was still quite effective and lengthened his career and when Ted Turner signed him with the Braves he came to town here and had a successful season with the Savannah Braves before he was called up to Atlanta where he went 1-3 in five starts and that was pretty much it on the diamond. His return to the majors was chronicled in a book by then sportswriter for The Savannah Morning News, Terry Pluto titled The Greatest Summer. Just as an aside, Terry was kind enough to do a very flattering story about me in the paper after I won the title of "Savannah's Favorite Sportscaster" in a non-scientific poll done by the newspaper.
The time I spent with Jim Bouton both at Grayson Stadium and at Tybee was delightful. He was very open about himself and his career and, by now, had become a family man,at least temporarily. He was married to his first wife Bobbie and they had two children together, Michael and Laurie, and they also adopted a Korean orphan who later changed his name to David. They divorced three years later but I knew nothing about that and it wasn't so much headline news. Bobbie also wrote a tell-all book called Home Games. Bouton was quite frank about it and freely admitted he was a highly flawed human being admitting that what Bobbie wrote was probably true. He admitted he smoked "grass" and he ran around, he found excuses to stay on the road and smoked grass to "numb myself." He explained it took him a year to get his brain to work again and admits that he no longer thought about pot as "harmless." But I knew him as a nice guy who gave me access when a lot of other people in his position would have had nothing to do with a young sportscaster.
Jim Bouton died on July 10th after fighting a brain disease linked to dementia. We are all richer for the people we meet and the friends we make in life and I'm glad I got to meet Jim. When one reads an obituary of someone who we don't know personally but was famous we often judge them by what we read since it's our only source. We read that they did some bad things and we judge them by only what we see in black and white. But when we have known them, even if only briefly as in this case, it's different. I knew a different Jim Bouton who loved his wife and family and the game of baseball and who once played it well so much so that he wanted to see if he could give it another "go." Okay, so it didn't work out so well but at least he gave it a try which is something a lot of us don't do and I admire him for it. I liked Jim Bouton and pray that he's with the Lord.