Who’s on Worst? by Filip Bondy

I know I’m merely reiterating a sentiment that’s been recorded a million billion times in the past, but there isn’t much of a better way to start a review of a book like this: Part of the big reason people are drawn to baseball is that it seems so humanized. The folks who go to the plate at the very highest levels of the game are are still hoping to be good enough to hit the ball three times out of ten, if even that. Baseball is human. Humans are very prone to mistakes. Baseball is such a challenging sport that greatness in it is decided by still being able to fail more often than having success. Three hits out of ten tries is the best ratio one dares hope for. The last time anyone did better than that was in 1941, and two things stick out about even that accomplishment: The first is that the hitter who successfully did that was still only hitting the ball four out of ten times. The second is that the hitter was Ted Williams, very possibly the greatest hitter of all time.

Is it any wonder we get so fascinated by books which celebrate the worst of the ballplayers? We’re not even insulting them, or mocking them, we’re celebrating them as regular old joes who make foibles trying to play a sport which demands more minute speed, reflexes, and awareness than any other. We love such celebrations because we realize if we tried to play baseball, we know that the people making the biggest errors could easily be us.

Some of us are also bad at making jokes or puns, such as Philip Bondy, a writer for the New York Daily News who wrote the book Who’s on Worst? This is another book celebrating the worst in baseball, and by the standards of what it’s supposed to be and what it’s trying to do, it’s a dandy.

Just when you think you’ve seen the worst of baseball covered at every conceivable angle, someone comes along and finds new things to spot that are rarely pointed out in baseball conversations. Yes, there are several standards inside Who’s on Worst? – the ever-ubiquitous worst hitters and worst pitchers are both in this one. Goats? Yep. Cheaters? Of course. So what’s new, exactly? Well, Bondy shows how narcissistic New York City sportswriters are by giving us a chapter on the most overpaid Yankees players. That’s not a coincidence; it’s an official chapter Bondy justifies by saying the Yankees have overpaid even by today’s ridiculous baseball economics. There’s a whole different chapter dedicated to the most overpaid players who weren’t Yankees. Telling of the era, there’s also a chapter full of players who used steroids but still sucked all over MLB.

At the end of every chapter, Bondy gives us his top ten list of the worst, but in the chapters he only expounds on half of them on average. This book could have been a lot stronger if he would have included the details for all of them. Maybe that was something the editor did, but if that’s the case, then this book really could have used a different editor. As for the arguments he uses to state his cases, Bondy is great at this. It takes guts to call Gene Mauch one of the worst managers of all time despite being number eight on the list of games won. Mauch’s record was 1902-2037 for his career, and he never made the World Series. He was responsible for The Phold while managing the Philadelphia Phillies and blew a couple of great chances with the California Angels. Bondy uses a quote or two to describe Mauch as a little guy who sacrificed more than a couple of wins to keep players in his personal doghouse and overworked his better pitchers.

His list of worst team owners is also pretty unusual. He includes both Frank McCourt and The Wilpons, but Peter Angelos and Jeffery Loria are numbers nine and ten respectively. Charlie Comiskey doesn’t even make the cut.

I found it difficult to get Bony’s angle on steroids. It’s certainly telling that he gives steroid “cheats” their own chapter, but he never seems to condemn it or condone it. He treats them as they’re just there, another obstacle MLB has to reckon with. Somehow, Manny Ramirez managed to get himself onto that particular list. Traditional folks on his cheating list include Gaylord Perry, a character asinine enough to try to defend himself while running his mouth about steroids. Others include Kevin Gross and Wilton Guerrero, Vlad’s brother.

One of the more interesting chapters is on star players whose relatives weren’t quite as good. Hank Aaron’s little brother only hit 13 home runs. Pete Rose’s boy had a career which didn’t run as long as his dad’s. There’s also chapters on goats and lucky players. I had qualms with these: Steve Bartman is listed as a goat, and Jeffery Maier is listed as lucky.

There’s a chapter on the biggest jerks in the league, too. It includes a couple of the usual suspects, like Dave Kingman and John Rocker, but also, surprisingly, Jeff Kent. There’s little question that Kent probably deserves to be known as such a jerk, but it’s a change seeing him get mentioned because he usually gets overshadowed by teammate Barry Bonds.

There’s really not much more to say. Filip Bondy’s Who’s on Worst is a fun, well-argued book about some of the worst things in baseball. It’s definitely worth checking out if you don’t mind being copped out by chapter-end lists which were only comprised of half the chapter, and therefore being deprived a several details you would want to know.

Ball Four by Jim Bouton

Ball Four hardly needs an introduction. If you’re at all familiar with baseball literature, you already know about it. It is the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The All in the Family. The Hamlet, Oliver Twist, Citizen Kane, or Super Mario Bros. 3. It was, in short, the baseball literature game changer that transcended its genre and reached an audience well beyond, and within the genre was quickly given that exalted status as the best of the bunch, ever. It has been 40 years since its original publication, and Ball Four is still widely considered the premier classic of all baseball literature. Hell, it’s widely considered the premier classic of all of sports literature in general, even though that’s not a particularly prestigious honor considering the poor quality of literature for other sports. (Fever Pitch was most definitely the exception, NOT the rule.) But the question I am answering today is whether or not it is really worthy of the accolades heaped upon it by avid readers of baseball books.

Yes. Yes it is.

…Oh. You’re still here. Okay, fine, since we’ve both got time to kill, I guess I’ll fill you in on all the other pointless details. Ball Four is the account of Jim Bouton, a once-promising pitcher who won a bunch of games for the New York Yankees before, I guess, his arm started to show its wear. The Yankees apparently decided they were better off without him, and for the 1969 season he was signed – some would probably argue banished – to the expansion Seattle Pilots, a team which would only be around for that lone 1969 season. This makes Ball Four not only a chronicle of a season, but a valuable journal about a team for which very little has been written and very few even realize ever existed. (Well, actually, they technically do still exist – they’ve just been the Milwaukee Brewers since 1970.)

The book most frequently compared to Ball Four is probably The Bronx Zoo, by Peter Golenbock and Sparky Lyle. This is a simplistic and rather unfortunate comparison. Not only is Ball Four far better than The Bronx Zoo, but the two teams the books revolve around have different makeup and mentalities and times. Lyle was a great pitcher who closed for a team that eventually won the World Series. Bouton was a great pitcher at one time, but when Ball Four picks up, his career is on a downward spiral. He’s been forced to adopt the knuckleball as his primary weapon and frequently voices his concern for just how good it actually is. He believes he’s good enough to start and makes his case for being a starter, but gets shellacked in his starts. Bouton also plays for the Pilots, an outfit that Seattle fans are merely lukewarm to. At one point, Bouton expresses his concern for the future of Seattle baseball after taking note of how many fans turn up at a game. Lyle writes a lot more about what happens on the field, while Bouton concentrates more on the mood and politics of the locker room and behind the scenes.

From the very beginning of the book, we get the impression that Jim Bouton is a bit of an odd duck. In the very first chapter, he talks about how he enjoys haggling with owners for better contracts. From there, Bouton presents himself as an intellectual. He reads and thinks a lot about many of the larger issues at hand, in both the baseball world and the real world. He gets into arguments with his teammates about some of the issues in the real world, which really makes him an outsider because his teammates appear to parrot a lot of the common, prevailing beliefs of the era. He thinks about the rights of the players and the kinds of things an owner would do to make a few extra pennies. There are a number of points where Bouton finds himself discussing racial issues, which hammers home the fact that this book was written in 1969, during the civil rights movement. This makes Ball Four more interesting because Bouton’s intelligence turns it into a look at the outside world that just happens to use baseball as its reference point.

Much has been said about Bouton’s view on Yankee legend Mickey Mantle in Ball Four, and let me tell you this: Word of mouth has turned it into a bigger issue than it needs to be. It really didn’t need to be brought up at all, in fact, because when Bouton writes of Mantle, he does so almost reverentially. The larger fact of how Bouton sees Mantle is that it doesn’t matter all that much anyway because Mantle is barely even mentioned. The most memorable Mick anecdote occurs when Bouton write about how he used to joke with Mantle about his injuries:
“After a while we used to joke in the outfield. I’d go over to Mick and say ‘Mick, how does your leg feel?’
‘Well, it’s severed at the knee.’
‘Yes, but does it hurt?’
‘No, I scotch-taped it back into place.’
‘And how’s your back?’
‘My back is broken in seven places.’
‘Can you swing the bat?’
‘Yeah, I can swing. If I can find some more scotch tape.’
‘Great. Well, get in there then. We need you.'”
This isn’t controversial or groundbreaking material. The so-called controversy surrounding Bouton’s view of Mantle isn’t worth the air it took people to breathe as they screamed in self-righteous indignation about it.

The Seattle Pilots are the team Bouton plays for throughout the bulk of the book. But what we’ve heard less about are the fact that during the 1969 season, Bouton gets sent down to a minor league affiliate of the Pilots, the Vancouver Mountaineers, early on and close to the end of the season gets traded to the Houston Astros for a player named Dooley Womack. His very short time with Vancouver takes Bouton on a trip to Hawaii to play against a minor league team there, which he considers one of the few great perks of minor league baseball, but he also talks about the sharp contrast between the minor and major leagues and the shock of going from one to the other. When Bouton is traded to Houston, the Astros are in the middle of a Pennant race. The locker room mentality is different from the one in Seattle, and Bouton is thrilled to have a chance to pitch against his childhood idol, Willie Mays.

One of the pleasures of reading such aged accounts of baseball seasons written in the first person is that you get real insight about how different things were back then. I already mentioned Bouton’s views on the civil rights movement, and Vietnam was also going on at the time. In baseball, there was a lot of talk about unionization and the revocation of the reserve clause. (I believe the trade of Curt Flood, which set off the challenge of the reserve clause, happened in 1969, but I’m not sure.) It was also the year the Cubs rocketed into first in the National League at the start of the season and looked to capture their first Pennant since 1945 before they got plowed over by the Mets, who would go on to win the World Series that year. (Probably much to the pleasure of Bouton, who holds some resentment with the Yankees for getting rid of him.) Lou Piniella, one of baseball’s greatest managers, was just a rookie player that season. He in fact was with the Pilots in spring training, and the Pilots got rid of him. But Bouton pays little mind to the things that were going on in the rest of baseball that year, just keeping focus on life in the locker room.

The crux of Ball Four is casting the seeing eye on the relationships that exist between Bouton and the various ballplayers he interacts with. He likes the manager of the Pilots, Joe Schultz, and Johnny Sain is a coach on the team, and seems to be friends with Steve Hovely. He certainly appreciates a number of other players too, like Sal Maglie. Unfortunately, a number of the other players have a habit of blending together. This doesn’t stop the nonstop anecdotes, like beaver-shooting, reminding spectators on a vote-for-your-favorite-Pilot day that your favorite Pilot didn’t necessarily have to be good, and using a handwarmer in August. He also includes a quick chapter about the terms ballplayers use. One of the semi-constant themes in Ball Four is Bouton trying to convince the team to buy Gatorade for the players, which was a relatively new drink at the time.

There is no doubt in my mind that Ball Four is indeed the best baseball book yet written. Books about the bad party teams and hidden locker room antics are a dime a dozen these days, but Ball Four’s unique and colorful social backdrop and colorful commentary still bring it out above the rest. Since the actual scenes of baseball in Ball Four are sparse and describe almost nothing, the book is really more about people than baseball or baseball players. I can’t say I believe Ball Four exceeds its hype about being the best baseball book on the planet, but it certainly matches it.