I’ll admit right up front that I knew nothing whatever of Jim Bouton the ballplayer until I came across Jim Bouton the writer. I was a toddler during his brief heyday with the New York Yankees. I was aware, of course, that such things as the Seattle Pilots existed during their brief heyday, but they were very far away from central Indiana, which was Cincinnati Reds country, with a little bit of Cubness thrown in here and there.
There was no internet. We could get one game a week on TV, and it featured whoever the network wanted to feature, and that was never the Seattle Pilots.