In 1969, pitcher Jim Bouton kept a diary during a season spent trying to hang on in the major leagues with the expansion Seattle Pilots and later the Houston Astros, and the resulting book shattered the carefully maintained image of professional baseball as a realm of wholesome, disciplined athletes. Bouton was a former twenty-game winner for the New York Yankees whose arm had lost its fastball, leaving him dependent on a knuckleball and his wits. His diary records the daily reality of professional baseball with an honesty that no insider had previously dared: players popping amphetamines to get through doubleheaders, voyeurism on road trips, petty cruelties of management, the financial anxieties of players without guaranteed contracts, and the loneliness of men spending months away from their families. But the book is far more than a scandal sheet. Bouton writes with genuine warmth about the camaraderie of the clubhouse, the physical pleasure of throwing a knuckleball that dances perfectly, and the desperate comedy of an expansion team losing more games than it wins. His portrait of the Seattle Pilots — a franchise so poorly managed it would relocate after a single season — is both hilarious and melancholy. The baseball establishment reacted with fury, and commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force Bouton to declare the book fictional. What made the book so threatening was not its revelations but its insistence that ballplayers were complicated, flawed, funny human beings rather than the cardboard heroes the sport's mythology required.