<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>