Ball Four
Ball Four is a 1976 American situation comedy that aired on CBS in 1976. The series is inspired by the 1970 book of the same name by Jim Bouton. Bouton co-created the show with humorist and television critic Marvin Kitman and sportswriter Vic Ziegel. Bouton also starred in the series.
Ball Four followed the Washington Americans, a fictitious minor league baseball team, dealing with the fallout from a series of Sports Illustrated articles written by Americans player Jim Barton. Like the book, the series covered controversial subjects including womanizing players, drug use, homosexuality in sports and religion. The series included a gay rookie ballplayer, one of the earliest regular gay characters on television. The trio began developing the series in 1975, looking to other series like M*A*S*H and All in the Family as models. CBS expressed interest and the creative team developed a script. CBS shot the pilot episode and ultimately bought the series.
Ball Four aired at 8:30 PM Eastern time, which was during the Family Viewing Hour, an FCC-mandated hour of early evening "family-friendly" broadcasting. Consequently the writers had some trouble with the network's Standards and Practices in their attempt to portray realistic locker room scenes, especially the language used by the players. Pseudo-profanity such as "bullpimp" was disallowed, while "horse-crock" and "bullhorse" were approved.
drystyx@drystyx
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.