Jeez, I’m running out of column ideas. Looks like Minnesota replaced The Best Pitcher in Baseball with Livan Hernandez. For Twins fans this must be like replacing Christmas with a punch in the nuts; the other Hernandez is not a good pitcher. Also, he’s fat.

Nobody’s been stupid enough yet to give Kyle Lohse the same ridiculous contract that the Mariners gave Carlos Silva, which I think is curious. As far as I’m concerned, they have pretty much the same value. It looks like the Phillies just got Kris Benson to agree to a minor league contract, so the list of potential employers for Lohse keeps getting shorter. Scott Boras, ladies and gentlemen!

That minor league contract for Benson may turn out to be a pretty good deal for the Phillies, actually; assuming he passes the physical. Low-risk, high reward. Of course, it may also turn out to be a PR nightmare.

Anyway, while I’ve been waiting for pitchers and catchers to report (the unofficial first day of spring) I’ve been re-reading Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, a spring training tradition of my own. If you haven’t ever read it before, pick it up. With the Super Bowl over, March Madness a month away, and two weeks before the first Mets spring training broadcast, you should have plenty of time on your hands.

Ball Four is a fantastic book. Jim Bouton had been a flame-throwing starter with the mighty Yankees teams of the early sixties, but by 1969 he was a marginal reliever just trying to hang on in the big leagues with a knuckleball and a sore elbow. His diary of the first season of the Seattle Pilots (you may know them now as the Milwaukee Brewers) is widely regarded as one of the best sports books ever.

Bouton was the first player to open the door to what goes on inside a major league clubhouse, and he was essentially blackballed for writing it. Some of its controversies seem almost quaint today (Mickey Mantle drank a lot! Ballplayers like to look at naked ladies!) but it was genuinely revolutionary at the time. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn famously asked Jim to sign a statement that Ball Four was all a lie; Bouton refused.

I re-read it every year in February or March for two reasons: one, because it’s great, and two, because it starts with Bouton trying to make the team in spring training, and that always gets me psyched for actual spring training. The ups and downs that Jim experiences over the season are still basically the same today.

I don’t want to spoil anything if you haven’t read the book (as much as one can spoil the surprise of events that occurred almost 40 years ago) but Bouton put together what looks to me like a pretty decent year for himself (2-3, 3.82 ERA in 122.2 innings, almost entirely in relief), so I was always curious about why Jim seemed to have such a hard time sticking with a bad Seattle club that was desperate for pitching. Bouton himself thought it was because he was regarded as a pinko lefty weirdo, but was that true? Or did he just stink?

Of course, those stats look pretty good these days, but the game has changed a lot in 40 years – not least in the fact that relievers used to pitch well over 100 innings. So let’s compare Jim to other pitchers from 1969 and see how he stacked up:

1969            ERA   BAA  OBAA  SLGA   K/9  BB/9  HR/9  K/BB
Bouton         3.82  .231  .310  .374   7.3   3.7   1.0   2.0
MLB Pitchers   3.61  .248  .320  .369   5.8   3.5   0.8   1.7

I’m looking at his peripheral rates, like strikeouts per nine innings pitched, because they can indicate more accurately how well a pitcher is throwing than ERA or win-loss record can. Anyway, in 1969 the Bulldog (aka Ass Eyes, Benedict Arnold) had a good strikeout rate, average walk rate, and a good strikeout-to-walk ratio, but he allowed too many homeruns. That’s what happens to knuckleballs that don’t knuckle.

As always, green = good, red = bad.

Of course we could have saved ourselves all this trouble and just looked up his ERA+: 91. A bit below average, but not terrible. I suspect Bouton’s smart mouth and unconventional behavior probably did influence how Pilots manager Joe Schultz used him, and ultimately how he was treated in baseball over the course of his career. Of course, those same qualities would help make Ball Four such a great book, and propel Jim Bouton from an interesting Pilots footnote to a baseball literature immortal.

Well, that and the gum.

Special thanks to Baseball-Reference and Jim Bouton. Both have provided me with many hours of enjoyment.