Matt Sisson recently sat down with Bill Nowlin to talk about his recent trip to see the Red Sox play in Japan, Japanese players in Major League Baseball and his books on Boston’s favorite team.

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Matt Sisson recently sat down with Rob Neyer, ESPN columnist and author of the new book Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends, to talk baseball.

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Matt Sisson recently sat down with Frank Russo, Author of the book Bury My Heart at Cooperstown: Salacious, Sad, and Surreal Deaths in the History of Baseball, and creater of the website thedeadballera.com to talk baseball.

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Matt Sisson recently sat down with author, Gene Carney, to talk about his love for baseball writing, his new book, A Baseball Family Album, and the opening of a Shoeless Joe Jackson museum in Greenville, SC.

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Matt Sisson recently sat down with Cory Schwartz, Director of Statistics for Major League Baseball and host of the show MLB Fantasy 411, to talk about his background in statistics, the 2008 Major League Baseball season and fantasy baseball.

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

Former major league pitcher Jim Bouton ended his controversial book Ball Four with those lines in 1969 and the nation has been in his grip ever since. The book was a best seller and was named one of the “Books of the 20^th Century” by the New York Public Library, but its success didn’t come without a price.

When his career ended in 1970 (he made a brief comeback in 1978) the former Yankee hurler affectionately known as “Bulldog” was exiled from Yankee Stadium due to the book’s candid revelations about baseball players’ off field activities and how the Yankees front office conducted its business.

Only six years earlier at the age of 25, Bouton was coming off consecutive seasons in which he won 21 and 18 regular season games, respectively, earned a spot on the American League All-Star team in 1963 and beat the Cardinals twice in the ’64 World Series. He copped only sixteen more wins over the rest of his career, played for three different teams after leaving the Yankees, attempted a comeback as a knuckleballer in 1978, and became a pariah for breaking one of baseball’s cardinal rules by exposing the privacy of baseball clubhouses to the general pubic.

Bouton’s son Michael wrote a letter to the New York Times in 1998 asking that the Yankees let bygones be bygones and invite his father back to “The House That Ruth Built” for Old Timers’ Day. The Yankees acquiesced and Bouton returned to Yankee Stadium for the first time in 28 years.

I learned in 2002 that Bouton was trying to convince the Seattle Mariners to host an Old Timers’ Day for the old Seattle Pilots, so I contacted him about granting me an interview and he graciously accepted. The following is a transcript of our conversation five years ago:

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