Jordan

Halfway through, I prewrote my review: Joe Posnanski's The Soul of Baseball made me cry while Ball Four did not.

But then I finished the 30-year update. A good addition. Laurie, and the Old Timers game were important to the story.

I decided to read this specifically because I watched The Long Goodbye in 2024 and loved it so much, I had no idea the guy who played Terry Lennox was a baseball player. And on top of that, he was the Jim Bouton who wrote this. I'd heard about Ball Four from baseball circles and in a strange coincidence it came up again at the tail end of 2023 in a conversation with a former college instructor/mentor whose friend knew Jim. The section in the book about working with Robert Altman and Elliot Gould served as a nice bookend for a long year for me.

Prescient! The lengths the "good guys" will go to save a Nazi because he is useful.

I had the ending spoiled for me by the foreword/introduction lol but still I was hanging onto every turn. The spycraft plays out through interviews and careful studying of interrogators' reactions to new information and gentle application of feigned outrage. It dawns on you how manufactured it all begins to feel, with The Plan having come together likely in front of a great and cozy fireplace, and everyone Leamas meets is a mouthpiece who represents something or someone else, who is going through the motions of procedure in dealing with a defector and reports to a higher up.

Somebody else, unseen, possibly known, miles away, is going to make a call (or already has) that will determine what happens next. Make no mistake, the events are happening whether you like it or not, and eventually you accept how helpless everyone really is.

You wonder whereabouts you've been dropped into the plan, near the beginning or the tail end (it matters because you thought you were there from the start but you don't know a damn thing by design), if the characters you are following have been penciled in for obsolescence and destruction, and you can only hope our protagonist and his beau (and the ruthless interrogator who was actually right all along) get thrown clear from the pachinko machine in a deus ex twist because you know it's going to get rough for them.

Two great lorries smash into a small car.

A cool, grey-coloured glimpse into the depths of a grinder.