Everybody likes to quote the story’s closing line. It’s a classic, no doubt. But the opener sticks with you. And those first few words stay fresh, forever young, while the part about the baseball gripping you back, well, it gets overdone and worn and cheesy.
“I’m thirty years old and I have these dreams,” Jim Bouton began in 1969. Jim Bouton died this week. The papers said he was 80. But he’s still right there in our memories, in the green shining grass of that one unforgettable season of Pilots baseball, and he’ll never be anything but thirty. Still dreaming. still grousing about Schultz and Milkes, still searching for a place to fit. And we, the lucky fans who saw him pitch, who snuck a peek at his book on the grocery store shelf a year later, who saved our dimes and bought a copy when mom wasn’t looking, well, we still have dreams too.
Still unpolluted by Ball Four.
I was 11 when Bouton played for the Pilots, 13 when I edged up to the counter at Jess Ruttles’ Port Gamble General Store and paid $1.25 for my paperback copy of Ball Four. The one I still have, anchoring the most awesome end of my shelf of awesome baseball books. I was forever changed. The man showed me it’s ok to say no to the boss. He proved there are famous powerful people who are also dicks, and that says way more about them than the fact they’re famous and powerful. And by the end of the book I knew, at age 13, that it’s OK to be something other than what everyone else thinks you should be. Jim Bouton turned me into a rebellious little shit fifty years ago and I’m damn grateful he did. His death is like losing a lifelong friend, if you believe he was 80. Believe he’s still 30, still dreaming… and he still lives, right there on that emerald diamond.
Yellow crinkled pages and all.
That last line in the book, the one that’s so much loved and overquoted all by itself, is best kept in context. You gotta understand, Jim Bouton was talking about Jim O’Toole. And this is what he said on that final page…
“And then I thought of Jim O’Toole and I felt both strange and sad. When I took the cab to the airport in Cincinnati I got into a conversation with the driver and he said he’d played ball that summer against Jim O’Toole. He said O’Toole was pitching for the Ross Eversoles in the Kentucky Industrial League. He said O’Toole is all washed up. He doesn’t have his fastball anymore but his control seems better than when he was with Cincinnati. I had to laugh at that. O’Toole won’t be trying to sneak one over the corner on Willie Mays in the Kentucky Industrial League.
“Jim O’Toole and I started out even in the spring. He wound up with the Ross Eversoles and I with a new lease on life. And as I daydreamed of being Fireman of the Year in 1970 I wondered what the dreams of Jim O’Toole are like these days. Then I thought, would I do that? When it’s over for me, would I be hanging on with the Ross Eversoles? I went down deep and the answer I came up with was yes.
“Yes I would. 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.”
What are your dreams like these days? What’s your Ross Eversoles?