James Alan Bouton was born in Newark on March 8, 1939. He started out playing American Legion ball, trying to perfect his knuckleball pitch. He graduated from Bloom High School in Chicago Heights, Ill. He spent a year at Western Michigan University before he was signed by the Yankees in December 1958. He made it to the big leagues in 1962. He was a pitcher of modest achievement who wrote the baseball tell all book - Ball Four in 1970. It told of selfishness, dopiness, childishness and meanspiritedness of young men often lionized for playing a boy¿s game very well, and many readers saw it, approvingly or not, as a scandalous betrayal of the baseball clubhouse. The book was his account of the 1969 baseball season, seven years after his big-league debut with the Yankees. It was also his attempt at age 30 to salvage a once-promising career by developing the game¿s most peculiar and least predictable pitch: the knuckleball. He later wrote his follow -up book I¿m Glad You Didn¿t Take It Personally.
James Alan Bouton passed away on July 10, 2019 at the age of 80 after a long struggle with vascular dementia.
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