Ball Four

So I'm really excited for Milwaukee because they're really nice people and it's a nice place.

The Seattle Pilots are, whenever I think of Ball Four, I think of that whole era of expansion and players who were kind of cast-offs and managers who didn't know how to handle young people.

And I think that's probably what happened in Seattle and probably in Milwaukee the following year.

I'm going to miss baseball.

So technically, it's a franchise championship for Seattle too today, the Seattle Pilots.

Seattle Pilots are famous because Jim Boughton wrote the first ever tell-all book in baseball, The Legendary Ball Four, one of the most important sports books of the 20th century.

The book that angered fellow players so much that one day from the dugout, Pete Rose yelled, F.U. Shakespeare at Jim Bowden.

F.U. Shakespeare, which has got to be one of the best chirps, one of the best heckles of all time.

and this Milwaukee team is actually the Seattle Pilots.

Let's go back here, because I read the Ball Four by Jim Bowden, which is one of the favorite books I read as a kid, and just was a crazy book.

If you've read it, you know what I'm talking about.

But it was the first book of sports journalism, really, that was out there where somebody was critical, and Jim Bowden was a pitcher for the Yankees, and then he went to the Seattle Pilots.

But my point is, I'm getting a little bit off topic here, but as a kid I read all the run to daylights and the Vince Lombardi score the game-winning touchdown and Forrest Gregg hit the block in the ice bowl and all the great championship games.

teams and games and the glory of the Dodgers, the glory of the Yankees.

And then you read this book, Ball Four, by Jim Boughton, and it tells you that pro athletes, in particular baseball players, are just screw-off kids.

And they're messing around doing things that you wouldn't think that they're doing.

There's two Womacks that I know.

Dooley Womack, who was featured in Jim Boughton's Ball Four.

I was traded for Dooley Bleeping Womack.

And Bobby Womack, who was best friends

He is a Dallas-based trial lawyer.

But he is also a historian, written a number of books and working on a new one right now.

He is also, like Ryan, a baseball super fan.

You'll notice here on my desk that one of Talmadge's two books on baseball called Baseball and the Baby Boomer.

We're going to talk some about that.

He also has another book called 1939 Baseball's Pivotal Year.

So you had godly men in this whole neighborhood enjoying baseball with each other and so on and so forth.

And then last but not least, I come from a family of history lovers, and the history of baseball is better preserved than the history of any other sport.

Burles in left, Office in center, Matthews in right, Gilbrish at third, Reuschler at short, Hubbard at second, Murphy at first, Nolan catching, and Jim Bout doing the pitching.

Jim, who I'm quite sure will be able to write another book after this 78 season.

Bout, who used to lose his cap all the time when he was a hard thrower with the Yankees, has lost it again throwing a knuckleball up there, losing it.

Bout wanted to prove a point that he could make it back into baseball.

And he faces Bill Matlock, the league's leading hitter with a 316 average.

Bout's pitch to Matlock, who takes the strike, and Bout loses his cap.

Jim wrote the book Ball Four.

Knuckleball fouled away to the left side.

I was seven and a half when the Chicago Bears kicked the hell out of the Patriots in Super Bowl XX, and I very candidly and frequently say that team was the greatest of all time.

So with Mike Ditka's passing, I return to a wonderful book by an author who I love named Rich Cohen, and his book, Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football.

And we're gonna look at Mike Ditka through a leadership lens, and what he was able to do to inspire greatness, and also many of the leadership characteristics that surely held him and the franchise back.

So one of the things you have to know about Mike Ditka was this.

By the 1980s, it was the main impression fans had of Hallas.

And we'll get to it later because I believe the leadership style, for better or worse, of Mike Ditka is inextricably linked to George Hallas and then his heirs, the McCaskey family, who is still running the Bears today.

But later in life, George Hallas wrote, or had a ghostwriter for sure, write the book Hallas by Hallas, and this is something interesting that he said.

"It was something said of me that I threw dollars as though they were manhole covers," he wrote in Hallas by Hallas.

Crazy.

Speaking of crazy, Mark, Ball Four, we hardly knew you.

Yeah, Bill talked about this series.

You know, I love the book.

[ball hitting mitt]

Looks like Gary Bell's line in ball four though.

No, they, they were going through the pitchers, the other team's hitters one day at the pitchers meeting, and Joe Schultz kept telling Bell to pitch everybody low and on the corner.

Finally, Bell said, "If I could pitch everybody low and on the corner, Joe, I'd be in the Hall of Fame." [laughs]