ball four (rosettabooks sports classics book 1)  <b>the 50th anniversary edition of “the book that changed baseball” (npr), chosen by <i>time</i> magazine as one of the “100 greatest non-fiction” books.</b><br /> <br /> when <i>ball four</i> was published in 1970, it created a firestorm. bouton was called a judas, a benedict arnold, and a “social leper” for having violated the “sanctity of the clubhouse.” baseball commissioner bowie kuhn tried to force bouton to sign a statement saying the book wasn’t true. ballplayers, most of whom hadn’t read it, denounced the book. it was even banned by a few libraries.<br /> <br /> almost everyone else, however, loved <i>ball four</i>. fans liked discovering that athletes were real people—often wildly funny people. david halberstam, who won a pulitzer for his reporting on vietnam, wrote a piece in <i>harper’s</i> that said of bouton: “he has written . . . a book deep in the american vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book.”<br /> <br /> today <i>ball four</i> has taken on another role—as a time capsule of life in the sixties. “it is not just a diary of bouton’s 1969 season with the seattle pilots and houston astros,” says sportswriter jim caple. “it’s a vibrant, funny, telling history of an era that seems even further away than four decades. to call it simply a ‘tell all book’ is like describing <i>the grapes of wrath</i> as a book about harvesting peaches in california.”<br /> <b>includes a new foreword by jim bouton&apos;s wife, paula kurman</b> <br /> “an irreverent, best-selling book that angered baseball’s hierarchy and changed the way journalists and fans viewed the sports world.” —<i>the washington post</i>