Ball Four

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.