Juuust a bit outside. Ball Four!, Part Three

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Juuust a bit outside. Ball Four!, Part Three

My fifth (or is it seventh?) reading of Jim Bouton’s Ball Four drives home the fact that baseball books to 1970 targeted boys and young men dishonestly and with anodyne prose. Jim Brosnan’s memoir of the 1959 season The Long Season (and its 1962 follow-up, Pennant Race) was also well received. It, too, came off as cocky, caustic and candid. My high-school ears perked up at his telling in the first...