Ball Four

Over the 1969 season, pitcher Jim Bouton kept a diary of his year with the Seattle Pilots and his late trade to the Houston Astros, and he looks back at his earlier career, mostly with the New York Yankees. Edited by sportswriter Leonard Shecter and first published in 1970, it wrote openly about what players kept private: obscene jokes, drunken womanizing and routine amphetamine use, along with Bouton's own anxiety about his pitching and his clashes with coaches. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to make Bouton declare it fiction, and sportswriters branded him a social leper. It later became the only sports title on the New York Public Library's 1996 Books of the Century list.

Nick Loper, the Chief Side Hustler at Side Hustle Nation, said it is well worth reading for anyone who follows baseball.