Ball Four

Maybe the timing was off on this one. Whatever it was, this TV series based on the book by Jim Bouton, gave fake names to actual players in Baseball History. The real names are in the book. The book is hilarious. It's mostly a bunch of one or two page segments in a "diary" about the baseball season in 1969 of the expansion team the Seattle Pilots, and later, in more toned down humor, the Houston Astros when Bouton is traded to that team for Dooley Womack. In the book, we get a humanization of ball players in an era when the greatest superstars were more mortal in that they were lucky if they made the big bundle of 100,000 a year. One super interesting character of the book is Mike Marshall, a pitcher who Bouton admires for his brain, but who has a poor season. A few seasons later, Marshall is almost a superstar pitcher. Bouton deems himself a forward thinking liberal, but often gets very conservative. He still sells himself well. The TV show told many of the same stories, such as incidents with actual players like Brabender and Talbot, only with the names being changed. There is obviously a super low budget, even for its time, and that may have hurt this show. Also, Baseball was undergoing a transformation from players who were "just like us" into total elitists.