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January 27, 2005
Ball Four and CNN
I am about halfway through Ball Four and I now understand why establishment people did not like it at the time. It portrays the average major league baseball player in 1969 as a pill-popping, boozing, womanizng, non-autograph signing peeping tom and that the average owner would lie to and mistreat players. Bouton also insulted pretty much all of his current and former bosses. Assuming what he wrote is true, then I can't blame his coworkers for feeling betrayed by him. That does not mean he should not have written it as it was a book that should have been written because it contained important truths, but I can understand why they would be mad. He broke a form of trust even though a lot of the things previously kept quiet were illegal and/or immoral. For instance the fans deserve to know that that many players were using stimulants and that some players were not signing their own autographs.
What I can't understand is why he was the first person to write about all these things when they had been going on for years and hundreds of people including many journalists knew about it. I think it is like what happened with CNN and Iraq (see here, here, and here). CNN did not report atrocities CNN knew were occuring in Iraq in order to get its reporters permission from the Iraqi government to stay there. Any reporter who went public with what happened in baseball (and maybe this is still true for baseball and other institutions) could lose his access to players and teams and maybe even lose his job. The truth should still come first and it is why I can never again trust CNN when it is reporting out of a dictatorship.
Posted by Pete at January 27, 2005 07:11 PM
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