Jim O’Toole – Playin' in the Dirt

The page is brown. It’s fifty years old, of course, half a century since I slid a buck and a quarter of lawn mowing money across the counter in Jess Ruttles’ Port Gamble General Store, when Mom turned her back to grab a couple cans of chili. Half a century since a book changed me forever.

No filter. The page has faded but the final words of Ball Four are as true as ever. Copyright – the late Jim Bouton.

It’s brown with age, and it’s brown from flipping to the end countless times in those fifty years.

“…would I do that? When it’s over for me, would I be hanging on with the Ross Eversoles?”

Do you think, when Jim Bouton wrote those words, paused, held his pen over the paper, deciding what to write next… Do you think he knew they’d lead into the greatest closing line of any book ever?

Continue reading “Ex-Mariner of the Year: Ross Eversoles Bracket”

Everybody likes to quote the story’s closing line. It’s a classic, no doubt. But the opener sticks with you. And those first few words stay fresh, forever young, while the part about the baseball gripping you back, well, it gets overdone and worn and cheesy.

Here’s to Jim Bouton, pullin’ up a chair and poundin’ some ol’ Budweiser with Schultz, Mincher, and Oyler.

“I’m thirty years old and I have these dreams,” Jim Bouton began in 1969. Jim Bouton died this week. The papers said he was 80. But he’s still right there in our memories, in the green shining grass of that one unforgettable season of Pilots baseball, and he’ll never be anything but thirty. Still dreaming. still grousing about Schultz and Milkes, still searching for a place to fit. And we, the lucky fans who saw him pitch, who snuck a peek at his book on the grocery store shelf a year later, who saved our dimes and bought a copy when mom wasn’t looking, well, we still have dreams too. Continue reading “Still 30 years old, still dreaming”