The next day he looked hung over out of his mind and was sent up to pinch-hit. I remember one time ’d been injured and didn’t expect to play, and I guess he got himself smashed. Hanging curve meets hung over Mickey Mantle He identified Johnny Blanchard as the catcher, but Elston Howard worked the plate that day. Bouton said it was three or four years ago, when it was six. There are some differences between the quote and the game, but they’re fairly minor. Bouton still wanted to make a good impression. After bouncing between the bullpen and startnig rotation, it was only his sixth start since Yankee manager Ralph Houk added him to the rotation to stay.
Looking further, it also makes sense that Bouton would be the eager beaver to gut it out. On June 6, 1963, the Yanks pulled Bouton with one out in the fourth immediately after Brandt hit an infield single to the pitcher. Let’s find out when some of Bouton’s better stories happened. When did those events actually happen? The info is so much easier to look up now with Retrosheet and ’s Play Index.
True, but Bouton also tells several good stories about his times with the Yankees that occurred years before the book was written. It’s a day-by-day season diary, with each entry noting what happened that day. On the face of it, Ball Four is an odd choice for tracers. Recently, I re-read Jim Bouton’s famous Ball Four and realized there are numerous stories in it begging for the tracer treatment. They were a lot of fun, and Neyer enjoyed them so much that he later did a book of his own, Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends, looking up tracers. It’s tricky as memories get hazy and distort some details of what happened. A tracer is a story an old ballplayer remembered from bygone days that James would research (or rather, have his then-assistant Rob Neyer research) and see if he can locate the event in the historical record.
In the early 1990s, Bill James wrote an annual post-Abstract work called his Baseball Books that featured tracers.
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