Pound that Budweiser

Jim Bouton finally took his base the other day, all these crowded years after "Ball Four." He was 80 years old, a baseball man whom baseball despised for awhile, because he had the temerity to have a sense of humor about this child's game. This never goes over well with entities whose self-reverence is as ironclad as baseball's.

Bouton, who had one great season with the Yankees and then a lot of less-great seasons, wrote about the dopiness and absurdity and comic pettiness of our Great Pastime, at a time when that simply wasn't done. That his affection for the game in spite of everything was clearly evident was a subtlety the guardians of the game utterly missed.

Of course, viewed from almost half-a-century's distance, "Ball Four" emerges as less outrageous than charming, a quaint period piece that paints a portrait of a time irretrievably lost. Today players routinely tweet out clubhouse intimacies far more irreverent than any in Bouton's still-entertaining read. If he spawned the era of glasnost in baseball, it has become even more glasnost-y than even its creator could have imagined.

Though it likely amused him no end. As most things about the game did.

Sadly, this capacity was stolen from him in his twilight years. Bouton suffered a stroke in 2012, and in 2017 revealed he was suffering from dementia. And so a man whose recollections were notorious  succumbed to a pitiless thief of recollection, an irony almost too awful to contemplate.

He is free from that irony now, if you believe in a merciful afterlife. And so let's send him off with a proper benediction -- i.e., what the manager of the woeful Seattle Pilots, Joe Schultz, used to say to Bouton and the rest of his sadsacks when they actually fooled around and won a game.

"Attaway to stomp on ‘em, men," old Joe would say. "Pound that Budweiser into you and go get ‘em tomorrow.”

Indeed.