But in 1965 he lost his fastball and won only four games. The next season, he led the team with eighteen wins, and picked up two more in the World Series. The following year, Bulldog won twenty-one games, and helped the Yankees win the American League pennant.

“I’ll have a line in my head, but then it’s gone.”īouton (Bulldog) was just twenty-three when the Yankees called him up from Double A, in 1962. “I don’t have the quickness I used to have,” he explained.

He had no motor deficits or physical impairment-the damage was limited to his language center. Fastballs and knucklers, mostly.īouton, at seventy-seven, is still as lean, gregarious, and witty as he was in his playing days, though he says that the lingering effects of a stroke, suffered four years ago, cause him to get jammed on words from time to time. More than a hundred miles away, in western Massachusetts, on the property of his large, lushly landscaped home, the former Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton threw a bucket of balls against a cinderblock wall that he built in his back yard, aiming each pitch at his hand-painted strike zone and hitting it more often than not. A gaggle of ex-pinstripers, some famous, others less so, returned to the house that Ruth built, that Steinbrenner rebuilt, and that Jeter moved across the street.

On a sunny day in mid-June, the New York Yankees celebrated Old-Timers’ Day for the seventieth time. The New York Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton, posing in uniform in this undated photo.

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