The wisdom of Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" -- without pounding that Budweiser.

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Ostensibly, this post is about baseball and beer, although I will not be approaching it from the angle of "craft at the ballpark," because I simply cannot muster the interest necessary to dissect the inept beer presentation of the Louisville Bats for a 21st consecutive year.

For all I know, it may have gotten better this year; if so, I'm sure it is an accident.

Rather, as I've reminded readers so often in the past, one does not live on IBUs alone. There must be cross-disciplinary associations, sometimes providing reinforcement, and often suggesting new perspectives.

Or, you can have a Bud Light.

Like the writer Seth Magalaner, I also read Ball Four around the year 1970, when I was 10 years old. It may have been 1971, because my copy was a paperback, generally released only after the publisher had profited sufficiently from the opening hardbound release.

It made a deep and abiding impression. In this review of sorts from 2009, Magalaner hits me right where I'm living these days.

Ball Four endures on strength of its characters, by Seth Magalaner (Hardball Cooperative)

I first read Ball Four in 1970, the year of its publication, when I was 10. In the years since, I have kept a copy fairly constantly on my bedside table; every few months I’ll usually pick it up and read some passages at random, the way a man of faith might refresh himself with a periodic dip into scripture. OK, I will not go so far as to suggest that Ball Four is a sacred text. But unlike virtually any other sports book I can name, it compels and rewards re-reading. Why?

Why? I'll be 55 on Monday, I'm running for mayor of New Albany, and in terms of my consciousness as it pertains to thirty-odd years in the beer trade ... well, I'm "fending off professional mortality, and re-defining (myself) in relation to (my) vocation and avocation."

For me, it’s because Bouton’s baseball diary stands in the classic line of great coming-of-age books, or perhaps more accurately, coming-of-consciousness books. He’s an archetypal comic hero, negotiating experience with a mixture of exhilaration and anxiety, and an acute, intuitive sense of both what he possesses and what he is missing. What makes this so poignant—and so resonant for readers of all ages—is that he’s outgrowing baseball’s acquiescent, adolescent mindset, fending off professional mortality, and re-defining himself in relation to his vocation and avocation, all at the same time. He’s Huck Finn, Yossarian, and Frank Bascombe stuffed into a single uniform. (With a dollop of Stephen Dedalus for good measure, as he struggles to master the sublime and ridiculous art of the knuckleball in the sweaty smithy of the bullpen. It’s easy to imagine a tonsured, Bud-soaked Joe Schultz grabbing his crotch and saying “Well, forge this.”).

Very eloquent.

Actually, I'm feeling stronger every day. Let's see where this goes.

On turning pro (1979-2011).

(Originally published in LEO in March, 2009 ... I've added two years to the tally)

This year marks the 32nd year of my professional beer drinking career.

The autumn of 1979 provided a familiar impetus for renouncing amateur status and turning pro. There was a messy breakup, and one morning during the worst of it my car suddenly veered away from the university’s parking lot in the direction of an adjacent package store. I wasn’t carded, and breakfast was two quart bottles of Colt ’45.

There was no looking back – except at those embryonic years of preparation, perpetually trapped in adolescence, but looking enviously at juicy adult privileges just around the corner.

Apart from wee nips taken during childhood from bottles of my father’s Oertels 92, my first real "cold one" was consumed at a junior high school party. Actually, four of us split a single can of Budweiser while hiding in the woods, safe from the prying eyes of the hostess’s parents, ostensibly attaining instant credibility by boasting of beer on our breaths and mimicking the outward appearance of drunkenness.

Later, like so many generations of New Albanians, my gang climbed another rung around the time that our first driver’s licenses were issued. Wheels meant easy access to the bountiful paradise of Louisville’s west end liquor stores, just down Vincennes Street and across the claustrophobic steel lanes of the K & I toll bridge.

Raging acne and social ineptitude precluded my being chosen as the one to go inside Liken’s or the Corner Store. Consequently, I was at the mercy of my companions’ tastes in beer, and this was problematic, because at this early stage of my palatal development the "flavor" of a beer was the single biggest impediment to ingesting its desired alcohol. My friends liked Sterling and Pabst. I didn’t, but they were doing the heavy lifting of acquisition. Being in no position to argue, I learned to adapt by chilling. The colder the beer, the less “flavor” it had, and the more I could drink of it. Accordingly, my mission in life became Styrofoam cooler maintenance – to nurture it, to protect it from harm, and most importantly, to keep it filled with ice.

But in high summer the cans got warm very quickly. Crammed into the back seat of a late model junker, and pulling the tab on an ice-cold can straight from the ice, I managed to down the first frozen gulps before being overwhelmed with the dismaying recognition that in spite of all reasonable precautions, the can still contained rapidly warming Sterling or Pabst.

Chugging made me gag. What to do?

A sufficient interval would pass, enough to encourage a carload’s presumption that the warm and thoroughly vile can in my hand had been emptied, and then the magical time would arrive for throwing it out the window. This called for consummate skill. In the humid still of a hot summer evening, misjudging the distance from the open window of a moving car to the muffled cushion of a grassy rural roadside meant disgrace if a loud "thump" echoed through the valley as the half-full can struck unrelenting pavement.

The verbal abuse to follow was not at all good-natured. After all, hadn’t we driven all the way to Louisville to spend every last dime on beer?

And so it came to pass that in this manner, slumped shamefully in the back seat trying desperately to choke down a warm Sterling, I resolved to become a better beer drinker than all of them. Granted, the precise meaning of “better” remained unclear, but as the others began to plan their careers in physics, cosmetology, and insurance sales, I worked at developing a feel for the generic concept of beer, which I came to understand as light-bodied and usually bastardized when compared to the golden continental lager that inspired it, and a taste for its flavor, or at least those discernable qualities differentiating it from cola and orange juice.

After turning pro, these youthful stumbles were brushed aside in favor of broader experiences. It was hard work to progress from the degradation of Schaefer "Weekender" 30-packs to the sublime pinnacle of Belgian Trappists and American Barley Wines, but at least those swill-soaked years of my youth were not wasted.

Or were they?