Jim Bouton Interviewed
Highlights from a “lost” 2004 radio broadcast
My friend John Rosenfelder alerted to me a telephone interview Jim Bouton had done with Jim Nelson for the 2005 NON-COMMvention Radio conference in Louisville. Nelson, a long-time DJ at 88.5 FM in Los Angeles, was with the now defunct Triplearadio.com at the time of the interview. He has generously permitted me to share portions of his transcript, never before published.
INTRO:
Has done motivational speaking for a living since 1980.
Before that he spoke on college campuses as an anti-war speaker in the 1960s (would follow Joan Baez and introduce Muhammad Ali), during his baseball career.
First talk he gave was when he was 19 at a Presbyterian Church in New Jersey after his first summer of professional baseball; discussed his experiences in the minors in Kearney, Nebraska.
Started speaking at sport banquets when he reached the majors in 1962.
JN: Did the Yankees approve of your antiwar speeches?
JB: “They weren’t aware of it the first year, but then after a while they were and that’s when I got my nickname: ‘The Communist.’ Some of the players asked me if I was working for Ho Chi Minh.”
JN: [asks about Bouton’s feelings for radio]
JB: “Yes. I first fell in love with radio back when I was in high school. Listening to music, late at night, with my brother. We shared a bedroom and we had twin beds, and between the twin beds was a little night table with a radio on there, and we would turn down the radio real low — this is like one o’clock in the morning, we’re supposed to be sleeping (these are school nights) and we would turn on the radio real low, and then spin the dial down to the black stations. In those days, in the 1950s, black artists weren’t played on the white stations, so to listen to the really good music that’s where we went down the dial and we’d listen to ‘Jammin’ with Sam’ — Sam Evans, who was a disc jockey in Chicago — and listen to all the great early groups: The Crows, The Flamingoes — all the bird groups — that’s when you fell in love with radio because he created a sort of a theater of the mind; he said he was down in his basement, all by himself, with a blue light on, and he would tell us what he was having for dinner, a plate sitting on an orange crate — that kind of thing. He created that image, and that’s one of the great things that radio can do and television can’t.”
JN: Do you still listen to the radio now?
JB: “Oh yeah. I always try to catch a public radio station, wherever I am, a station that picks up NPR. And you can go down the dial pretty quick and you almost tell the first five words you hear: ‘Okay, here it is!’ There’s a tone to it, there’s a level of intelligence.”
JN: You made the All-Star team in 1963, your second year in the majors. Did you get to pitch in the game?
JB: “Yes, I pitched one inning, I got three up and three down.”
JN: Were you throwing the knuckleball then? [Stopped throwing the knuckleball at Double-A Amarillo because his fastball was getting faster and he couldn’t go back and forth between the two]
JB: “A knuckleball requires the touch of a brain surgeon, and the fastball was like using a jackhammer, and it would always take me a couple of pitches to get adjusted. Once you got into the higher levels of baseball you didn’t have a couple of pitches to get adjusted.”
JN: You joined the Yankees the year after Maris’s 61 homers and Mantles 54. That must have been a pretty electric time. And you got to pitch a game against Drysdale at Dodger Stadium in the 1963 World Series. What is your best memory from your time in the major leagues?
JB: “I think my first start in the big leagues is [still] pretty overwhelming for me, pretty exciting.”
JN: Where was that?
JB: “At Yankee Stadium, my first time I ever pitched at Yankee Stadium, they gave me a start against the Washington Senators. I pitched a complete game shutout, but it was the worst shutout in the history of baseball. I walked seven guys and I gave up seven hits. I pitched the entire game from the stretch position, and after the game was over, Ralph Houk, the manager, came over and said, ‘Any more shutouts like that and we’re going to need a new bullpen.’”
JN: What was your motivation for writing Ball Four, and did you anticipate the reaction it received throughout MLB?
JB: “My motivation was I wanted to share the fun of baseball with fans. I always considered myself a fan as a baseball player. As a matter of fact, one of my roommates said I was the first fan to make it to the big leagues. It was a wild and funny time and I wanted to share that with readers. I just thought they would get a kick out of what it was like to be on a major league baseball team. [chuckles] They would be shocked and thrilled to see what it’s really like, what the guys are like. And I was right about that, because people really liked to see the inside view of it. I thought there would be some reaction against the book; I mean, I knew I was saying things in the book that hadn’t been said before in a sports book, but I didn’t expect it to be so loud and long-lasting, particularly once people started reading the book and realized that it was a fun book and it wasn’t a tell-all book in that sense, the fans were loving the book. Meanwhile, the sports writers are still criticizing it.”
JN: So you’re still frowned upon in some circles?
JB: “Some circles, yes. But now when I go into a major league clubhouse, on the few occasions I’ve had to do that, the modern players, if they recognize me or if somebody tells them who I am, they’ll come over and say, ‘Hey, I read Ball Four in high school, thanks, nice to meet you. Couldn’t wait to get to the big leagues after I read Ball Four.’ But then there will always be like an old coach sitting over in the corner looking at me, somebody in his 60s or 70s, saying to himself, ‘I wouldn’t talk to that son of a bitch.’ So it really depends on what the generation is.”
JN: Did the book come out while you were still on the Astros?
JB: “Yes. I was pitching in games while the opposing team was screaming at me from the opposing dugout. I remember once standing on the mound in Cincinnati, pitching against the Reds, and Pete Rose is standing on the top step of the dugout screaming, ‘F@#k you, Shakespeare!’”
JN: Do you think that overall in the last two or three decades that MLB has improved itself?
“Well the players are bigger, they’re stronger, they’re faster. The coaches are smarter, they’ve got video cameras now, they have better teaching methods, they’ve got weight training, they count the pitches, they take better care of the pitchers, for example, they don’t let them throw too many pitches, they give them proper rest, all of that, so the health of the players is much advanced over the way it used to be. Without sounding like an old fogy, I don’t like the way the game is presented at the ballpark: it’s too much noise, too many advertisements, the [ballparks] all have this television set out in center field and blasting advertising messages and silly games while the players are taking batting practice, and baseball is basically saying, ‘Don’t watch the players, watch this television set up here,’ which doesn’t even show respect for their own industry, their own game.
“Also, the subtle beauties of baseball have been replaced by the home run; you know, get some guys on base and somebody hit a home run, so the bunt has become insignificant. You’ve [got] guys who can’t even bunt anymore, bunting, hit-and-run, moving the runner over, stolen base, hitting the cut-off man, the little things are ignored now in favor of power guys who can hit the ball a long way, so a 14–10 game doesn’t require too much strategy, so the strategy is gone out of it. So you’re watching what looks like superhero baseball now, like at a pinball arcade with noise blaring from center field. You go to a sporting event today it’s like going to a rock concert. You might as well not even be at a sporting event. You sit there trying to watch the game, you can’t even say to the child sitting next to you, ‘I think he’s going to bunt here.’ First off the kid would say, ‘What’s a bunt,’ secondly he wouldn’t be able to hear what you were saying unless you screamed it. And then the fans are just so boorish and stupid, standing on every single pitch: Up, down, up, down. Sit down. If everybody sits down, everybody can see just as well as if everybody stands up, so sit down. It just seems like a stupid place now, compared to the way it used to be.”
JN: So you don’t enjoy going out to a major league game anymore.
“No, I don’t. I much prefer watching kids play in a pickup game down in the sandlot.”
