What Michael can learn from Jim Bouton

Jim Bouton

I cried when I finished reading "Ball Four." I was 29 years old when I finally read Jim Bouton's controversial, honest and beautiful memoir and the last line of that book is my favorite sentence in the English language.
Yes, it's better that "Play ball," at least to me, because it's the most truthful thing I've ever read.

"You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out it was the other way around all the time."

 I'm not going to overanalyse this passage, other than to say it's so simple. There is no high-flying rhetoric, just honesty. Something that's in short supply these days. Yes, the sentence seems corny, but when Jim Bouton ended his book - a memoir that peeled back the cover of Major League Baseball and showed its seedy underside - you realize how much a simple game can mean to a man who is portrayed as being so jaded.

I thought about this passage the other day as I was holding Michael. I guess it turned out it was the other way around.