The St. Mary’s Five

A Reading from the Book of Bouton

Sister Mary Jean Patrice, principal of St. Mary’s School in Chardon, Ohio, noticed something odd among the boys in the eighth grade.

They were reading.

But it wasn’t just that they were reading. It was that they were reading the same book. And it wasn’t all the boys. Of the eighteen boys in my St. Mary’s class of 1971 (along with about thirty girls), five of us were reading the same paperback version of Ball Four by Jim Bouton.

Sister Mary Jean Patrice was not familiar with Ball Four by Jim Bouton, so she asked one of us if she could borrow a copy to peruse that evening.

Ball Four was a different kind of sports book. Up to that time, most sports books were either hagiographies or as-told-to autobiographies of sports legends like Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, Jim Brown, or Wilt Chamberlain. As young boys, my friends and I read as many of these as we could get our hands on.

When Shelley and I dated in college, she referenced a book she had read as a child called Br’er Rabbit. I didn’t know what that was.

“You’ve never read Br’er Rabbit?” she said, as if I had just admitted I had never drunk water.

This, apparently, was a classic of children’s literature.

“Well,” I countered, “have you ever read The Greatest Running Backs of the NFL?”

And therein lies an example of the cultural differences that to this day have kept our marriage full of surprises… and a fair amount of eye-rolling.[1]

The author of Ball Four, Jim Bouton, was not a legendary baseball player— or a legendary rabbit. He was an average player recording a diary of his season playing for the expansion Seattle Pilots[2] in 1969. As a young pitcher earlier in the decade, Bouton had gained fleeting stardom as a 21-game winner for the New York Yankees. But since then, arm problems had reduced him to a thirty-year-old journeyman who had to develop a knuckleball just to hang on. Hence the book’s subtitle: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues.

For Bouton, it all may have ended if the Major Leagues hadn’t expanded in 1969 to four more cities: San Diego, Montreal, Kansas City, and Seattle. The Pilots invited Bouton to spring training, and he made the team as a relief pitcher. He decided to talk into a tape recorder every day to chronicle his experience. The book turned out to be an honest, authentic, and funny inside account of the ups and downs of an ordinary player, a zigzag journey that took him from playing for one of the worst teams in the big leagues to getting sent to the minors to getting called back up from the minors to being traded to a pennant contender. This was long before the big money free agency era, a bygone time when many players negotiated their own contracts and, in the off-season, had to sell insurance or real estate or work construction to pay the bills.[3]

The book was filled with funny locker room stories that appealed to our adolescent, knuckleball brains. For instance, we learned about “beaver shooting,” which was essentially a male-bonding, Peeping Tom activity practiced by players who would peek under the stands or – when venturing onto the roofs of hotels – into the windows of other buildings trying to catch a glimpse of a naked woman. The success rate of shooting a good beaver was similar to that of hitting a wicked curveball from Bob Gibson. Not very good. It was the striving that made it fun.

We learned that “Ding Dong” was the nickname for pitcher Gary Bell and also “what guys holler when somebody gets hit in the cup.”

We read about the legendary Mickey Mantle hitting a home run when he was hungover.

We committed to memory lines Bouton relayed about players choosing an All-Ugly team: “His face looks like a bag of melted caramels,” and “He looks like his face caught on fire and somebody tried to put it out with a track shoe.”

The uncensored conversations in Bouton’s account included a fair amount of swearing. Pilots’ manager, Joe Shultz’s favorite curse was “Shitfuck.” The ever-creative Schultz’s second favorite curse was “Fuckshit.” We also learned the “Magic Word” that will get a player thrown out of a game: “Motherfucker.”

Bouton told stories of players carousing – Shultz would often end team meetings with the inspirational cry “Now let’s go pound some Budweiser!”—and the pranks they’d play on each other. Some were lighthearted like filling a teammate’s hair dryer with talcum powder, so when he turned it on his hair would turn white; or nailing someone’s shoes to the floor. Or edgier ones like presenting a married teammate with a fake paternity suit. Bouton recounts the gallows humor that permeated this precarious profession. When a player got sent down to the minors, teammates said he “died.”

But Ball Four was also full of insights about being a nonconformist inside a hidebound institution, about race relations, the Vietnam War, standing up to authority, the importance of unions, working with disparate personalities toward a common goal, and finding a way to get along with people you disagree with politically.

It was different because it wasn’t about winning the big game. It lived in the idle hours between games, the side conversations in bullpens and clubhouses, the day-to-day pressures. It was not a book about climbing the mountain to success; it was about trying not to fall off.

After the book came out and became a bestseller, Bouton was called into the office of Major League Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn and reprimanded for telling such scurrilous stories. Kuhn refused to believe that Mickey Mantle hit a home run while hungover. “What could you be thinking?” he reportedly asked Bouton. His peers, who already considered him an oddball, accused Bouton of “violating the sanctity of the locker room,” which only lent credence to his account.

Bouton maintained that he merely set out to write a funny book about a game he loved. To me and my friends it was clear he had no ax to grind. He wasn’t out to set the record straight about anything. That ingenuousness gave the book its power. Ball Four ends with one of the most memorable lines in any sports book, when Bouton concludes that even after his major league talents had diminished, he would most likely keep playing at lower levels: “You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out it was the other way around all the time.”[4]

Sister Mary Jean Patrice was not baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, but she held an even more powerful position as principal of St. Mary’s School. It was into her office the five “Ballfouristas” were summoned the next day: Jack Kennedy, Mike Amantea, John Park, John Mauser, and me, Steve Skrovan, the St. Mary’s Five.

Sister Mary Jean Patrice was a petite nun, not the intimidating stereotype of an authoritarian Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, perpetuated by my fellow stand-up comics who had also survived parochial school. We were a tiny country parish that had only enough nuns to staff every other grade. I had nuns in the even numbered years, the second, fourth, sixth, and eight grades, and have no horror stories to tell. St. Mary’s nuns did not practice corporal punishment. No rulers smacking our knuckles or paddles whacking our bottoms. By the sixth grade, we boys were likely harder on these young women than they were on us. The worst thing a nun ever made me do was line up for the lavatory, where we’d be let in only two or three at a time on the perfectly reasonable theory that too many young boys in a confined space generally inaccessible to an all-female staff would create a critical mass that could cause a chain reaction of God only knows what.[5]

That being said, Sister Mary Jean Patrice despite her short stature (or maybe because of it), had a reputation for being tough, feisty. She motioned for us to crowd onto a couch while she stood above us in front of her desk, brandishing the paperback. She had read it that night – or at least skimmed it – and was dismayed, especially by one particular passage.

I braced myself for a sermon by a Sister of Notre Dame about the evils of beaver shooting.

Thankfully, that wasn’t the one.

Apparently the first thing she turned to was a story about how Hall of Famer, Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox, would psyche himself up during batting practice:

He'd go into the cage, wave his bat at the pitcher and start screaming at the top of his voice, “My name is Ted fucking Williams and I’m the greatest hitter in baseball.”

He’d swing and hit a line drive.

“Jesus H. Christ Himself couldn’t get me out.”

And he’d hit another.

Then he’d say, “Here comes Jim Bunning, Jim fucking Bunning and that little shit slider of his.”

Wham!

“He doesn’t really think he’s going to get me out with that shit.”

Blam!

“I’m Ted fucking Williams.”

Sock![6]

Sister Mary Jean Patrice informed us that not only was she a baseball fan, but she had grown up in Boston. Ted Williams was her favorite player. She could not believe that her hero, Ted Williams, who was indeed the greatest hitter in baseball, would speak that way, would take the Lord’s name in vain.

In measured yet disappointed tones, she delivered her verdict: while she could not control what we read outside of school, she didn’t want to see this book at St. Mary’s again.

“Fill your mind with good things,” she advised, as she ushered us out of her office.

As far as we were concerned, we were filling our mind with good things. I can’t speak for my compatriots, but a book like Ball Four was a revelation. It demystified the game and its participants, not just the players, but the coaches and executives, too. It actually made the dream of becoming a professional athlete more accessible, because it reminded us that these people were not gods. They were human, flawed, and struggling just like the rest of us, except maybe Ted Williams of the MFL (Major Fucking Leagues).

To this day, I am drawn to books or documentaries or podcasts that pull the veil from the powerful institutions that order our lives, from corporate Godzillas to the federal government to the Supreme Court to the Church.

Ultimately, banning the book made it all the more attractive to us, transforming it from mischievous fun to sacred text. Outside of school, we continued to read passages aloud to each other like the gospel at mass, “A reading from the Book of Bouton” we’d intone… “June 25^th…”

Today Joe Shultz said, “Nice going out there today, Jim.”

The only thing I’d done all day was warm up.

“Joe, I had a fantastic knuckleball today,” I said. “Just fantastic.”

“Did you?” Joe Shultz said. “Did you have the feel of it?”

“I sure did.”

Whereupon Joe Shultz grabbed his crotch and said, “Well, feel this.”[7]

This has been a reading from the Book of Bouton.

Now let’s go pound some Budweiser!

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[1] Shelley contends that it was the fact that I hadn’t heard of Stuart Little that really surprised her, and she reminded me that she read Ball Four soon after hearing about it from me. That early in our relationship, this was obviously part of a background check and may account for the nine years it took before she agreed to marry me. I still haven’t read Br’er Rabbit… or Stuart Little.

[2] This team lasted exactly one season in Seattle before departing to Milwaukee to become the Brewers.

[3] Bouton’s salary that year was $22,000.

[4] Ball Four, Jim Bouton, edited by Leonard Shecter, Pg. 398

[5] Some thirty or so years after graduating from eighth grade, a number of girls (women) from our class organized a reunion. Our fourth grade teacher attended the Sunday mass: Sister Mary Campion, who was still a nun but now went by her given name and no longer wore a habit. When I introduced myself to her, the first thing she said was, “Oh, I hope I didn’t do too much damage.” I assured her I had come away unscathed.

[6] Ibid pgs. 231-232.

[7] Ibid pg. 232