Jim Bouton does not look much like a major league baseball pitcher. This former New York Yankee appears too slight for that role, but he certainly shows himself tough enough. Decades after his playing career this 67-year-old entrepreneur appears remarkably trim and often combative.

In 1970 he shook up the baseball world and made himself persona non grata to its bosses by publishing Ball Four, an exposé of how the sport really works. Unveiling the seamy side of the business and the often dubious antics of his fellow players, he made few friends and many enemies.

In town for a law school forum a few weeks ago, Bouton focused mostly on his recent abortive efforts to renovate Wahconah Park, the dilapidated stadium in Pittsfield. Blocked by politicians, he and his business partner have had to give up their dream of renewing baseball in a western Massachusetts city where, according one historical record, the sport was played as early as 1791.

My own interest in Bouton focused less on his real-estate frustrations and more on his experience as a player. Taken by my father to ball games in Boston starting in the 1930s, I am one of the few people still around who remember seeing the Boston Bees play at the Beehive, on Commonwealth Avenue, before they resumed their old name Braves. When the Red Sox traveled out of town, the Bees were at home with their combination of formidable pitching and woefully weak hitting.

Jim Bouton broke into the majors with the Yankees in 1962. In his second season, he pitched brilliantly, winning 21 games and losing only 7 with an earned run average of 2.53. In 1964, he appeared in the World Series against the Cardinals and won two games. Later, however, he developed a sore arm, had to convert to a knuckle ball, and never again compiled much of a record on the field.

In Ball Four, long since famous for its muckraking, Bouton relied on a secret diary he had kept while with the Seattle Pilots, a team that existed for only a single year. However, the book also contains a trove of anecdotes from the years he spent with the Yankees and, later, other teams.

His stories about fellow players ring true. Sometimes, as he now tells it, he would go to the bathroom to write down exactly what he had heard players saying, before the words could slip from his memory.

At the forum he told an anecdote about Mickey Mantle, the Yankee slugger whom Bouton calls “the greatest player I ever saw.” One day the team played in Minneapolis and that night Mickey went out with some of the other guys to a bar. There he drank himself into stupefaction, as was often his custom.

The next day, when the teams faced off again, Mickey was announced as out of the lineup because of a pulled rib cage. Actually, he was in the trainer’s room, out of uniform, thoroughly hung over. However, when the game went into extra innings, the manager needed a pinch hitter, so he sent into the clubhouse to get Mantle.

The latter pulled himself together, strode to the plate, and, on the first pitch smashed a 450 foot home run over the center field fence. But the drama was not over: His teammates wondered if Mickey would be able to find the bases and run toward each one of them.

Asked later how he achieved the home run, Mantle said “It was simple: I hit the middle ball.”

When quizzed now about players’ high salaries, Bouton does not speak delicately. “After 100 years of owners screwing players, for 30 years the players screwed the owners; we have 70 years to go” In Ball Four he details how stingy the moneybags running the Yankees were about paying him a decent wage even after two years of all-star performances.

The management of that same team held a grudge against Bouton for decades. Not until 1998 did they invite him to Old Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium. That happened only after Bouton’s son had published an op-ed piece telling of his sister’s death and the Yankees’ boycott against his father.

Employment conditions were such that Bouton busied himself playing an adversarial role against his bosses, dampening the fun he got out of the game. His book has brought him much more money and attention than his career as a player ever did. He has proven himself a skilled writer and an engrossing speaker about his experiences.

Like many another classic, Bouton’s book has lost some of its zip. Ironically, it has fallen victim to the author’s success in raising the curtain and revealing what the game on its highest level was really like. Jim Bouton in person, however, still brings a sharp mind and a perceptive spirit to a sports business that continues to need its critics.

Richard Griffin

The high school teacher pointed to four of his students and told them sternly that they would have detention that afternoon. They would be required to stay after school because they had been acting up in his classroom.

In response, the ringleader of the group announced “I’m not staying here,” and promptly stomped out, followed by the other three boys. Of that event, which occurred in December of his first year as a teacher, Richard Kindleberger says: “I had a mini-mutiny on my hands.”

Kindleberger later worked out this particular problem but, as this anecdote suggests, the first months of teaching can be fairly rough. In this instance the teacher was almost 60 with a long and rewarding career elsewhere.

On balance, however, he is glad he took on this new role in the world of work. “I feel gratified and satisfied with my experience,” he says, “even though it has been hard.”

Before becoming a teacher, Kindleberger spent more than 30 years as a newspaperman. He wrote for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette before moving to the Boston Globe in 1972. At this paper he covered a wide variety of areas, including the environment, the State House, and the “Spotlight Team,” the Globe’s investigative arm.

In his later years there, he transferred to business and wrote first about security and mutual funds, then about real estate, both retail and commercial. Some of the work he found exciting, as when he went up against the Boston School Committee and later when he took on the notoriously ornery John Silber, then president of Boston University. He recalls having been thrown out of the latter’s office when Silber objected to his line of questioning.

“A good way to spend one’s active work life,” says Kindleberger about his years as a journalist. It satisfied him to write about such a variety of topics for a newspaper that had achieved dominance in New England. But when the company offered a buyout for employees near the normal retirement age, he decided to take the deal.

“I wanted to do something else,” he says of his decision. Not for him was the formerly conventional view of retirement. He did not want to put his feet up and simply take it easy. Instead, he desired a challenge that would come from taking on a different kind of work.

A trip he and his wife made to Costa Rica stirred in him the desire to learn Spanish. “That trip gave me the bug,” he says, recalling how he first became enthusiastic about the language. This interest turned out to be no mere passing phase. Instead, he plunged into Spanish studies, first hiring a tutor, then taking an immersion course in Mexico, spending a summer in Madrid, and finally getting a master’s degree in the subject.

The decision to become a teacher came readily, in part because his father and his sisters had followed that same path before him. In what he thinks of as a “way of getting my feet wet,” Kindleberger started teaching a course for some of his neighbors. Then he passed the state exam for teacher certification and was offered a part-time job by a North Shore town, starting in the fall of 2004.

From the beginning, this former newsman has found himself warmly accepted by fellow teachers and the school’s administration. “I felt very much made welcome,” he says of their response. “They were willing to take a chance on non-traditional careers.”

The response of the students, however, appeared to be mixed. “The kids seem to have a different way of relating to teachers,” he explains. They are less impressed with their teachers as authority figures than he recalls from his own school days.

The adolescents also remain less focused on their studies; teachers must compete with television and video games. Some students also are distracted by problems they encounter at home. Looking on their Spanish teacher as a man of a certain age, they often tease him as being “out of it.”

As a result, “the learning curve has been steep for me,” Kindleberger freely admits. Classroom management has proven to be more of a challenge than he expected. However, he credits the wealth of experience he has of himself and the world of work with enabling him to withstand some of the rough parts of the job.

Would he advise others to make the same kind of transition to teaching? “I would not discourage anyone from trying it,” he says, “but they should not expect it to be always fun.” He has no regrets personally, but he cannot deny it has been hard.

In fact, he plans to take next year off and then will investigate alternative teaching positions. His hope ─ shared by teachers of all ages ─ is to find students who are eager to respond to his enthusiasm and love for his subject.

Richard Griffin

A historically significant death occurred this winter without anyone shedding tears. On January 27, the last telegram was sent. Western Union has announced the demise of this technology, once such a significant part of American life. The telegraph machine has tapped its last.

Invented by Bostonian Samuel F. B. Morse, the telegraph replaced the Pony Express as a means of coast-to-coast communication. On May 24, 1844 Morse sent the first public message from Washington, D.C. to his assistant in Baltimore, “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?” From that memorable moment on, the device took its place as a basic institution in American life.

145 years ago this month, Jefferson Davis received a telegram informing him that he had been chosen president of the Confederacy of southern states that had broken with the federal government. On reading the message, the reluctant official turned ashen with fear for the future.

A telegram from Orville Wright to his father carried news of the first airplane flight in 1903. In December 1941, a telegram from the commander of the Pacific Fleet read: AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NO DRILL.

Telegrams were not always terse; in February 1946, George Kennan, a diplomat based at the American embassy in Moscow, sent his classic “Long Telegram” to the State Department, providing a scholarly and wise analysis of the threats that the Soviet Union then posed.

Movies of my growing-up years often featured dramatic scenes of people receiving the characteristic yellow envelope with news, sometimes joyful, often devastating. In the latter category, were ranked the telegrams delivered by military personnel and the received by families of WWII casualties: WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU.  .  .

Unlike many of my age peers, I remember receiving a telegram only once. Mine came to me in 1971 from a staff person in the office of the governor of Massachusetts. I was in Paris with a delegation of anti-war Americans who were meeting with Vietnamese officials. The terse message simply said: “PLEASE PROCEED.” That meant I could continue trying to sound out the North Vietnamese on a plan that would dramatize opposition to the Vietnam War.

The then governor of the commonwealth, Frank Sargent, was open to this plan whereby North Vietnam would agree to release Massachusetts prisoners of war in return for the governor’s promise not to allow residents of the state to be sent to fight in Vietnam. I considered it a brilliant anti-war move in part because it would pit a Republican governor against the Republican President Nixon.

Ultimately nothing came of the plan, but the telegram still occupies a place in my  files. I suppose it might have been entered in evidence against me if the federal government had brought charges against our delegation, as a lawyer friend suggested it could have done.

As an institution, the telegram has now fallen victim to other devices, faster and more direct. Morse’s invention was always only half a technology, anyway, since it depended on human legs to deliver the message to its intended recipient. By contrast with email, for example, it did not come directly to you unless you were operating a machine to receive it.

Like email, the telegram gave rise to a special language, one feature of which was the word “STOP.” Senders used this word often because, unlike punctuation marks, it did not cost money.

The rapid pace at which technologies come and go in contemporary America continues to astound me and my age peers. New communication devices, in particular, enter the market in bewildering profusion. I feel at a loss to evaluate what is worth purchasing among the gizmos that promise to take photos, show you movies, and play your favorite music, all at the touch of a button.

Which current technologies will follow telegrams to the grave? That could be the subject of a parlor game, if we still had parlors. One that has surprised me in its recent decline is the FAX machine. After only a few decades of common use, it seems to have been supplanted in large part by various computerized devices.

These devices encourage an abbreviated language that often echoes that of telegrams. Baltimore Sun reporter Stephen Kiehl recently noted the use of telegraphese by text messaging teenagers and Blackberry-equipped executives. (In the jargon of the day, Blackberry is described as “a wireless email solution for mobile professionals.)

But in a hundred years or so, when our current technologies have expired, will journalists write articles about famous text messages, or the Blackberry that changed history? Will our instant communications have a place in our family files, or in the archives of our great institutions?

The telegram─which must have seemed impersonal and ephemeral to the contemporaries of Samuel Morse─proved itself to be an extraordinary source of private and public drama. We are still waiting for similar possibilities in our current technologies.

Richard Griffin

“What is life all about anyway if not to honor our relationships and take care of people who took care of us? What makes us human if not this caring?”

These questions formed part of a message I received last December in response to a column about parent care. My reader identified herself as Nina Fiore, a 31-year-old woman who had spent the previous year taking care, first of her father, then of her uncle, as they were dying.

To do so, this young woman had to break off her career, leave her home, and provide for both these family members in turn. Of this time she writes: “The experience is both rewarding and incredibly difficult at the same time.”

To her, it is mistaken to consider care of the dying as merely a responsibility or as burdensome. In fact, she criticized my column about a middle-aged career woman who abandoned her work and moved back home to help her mother. This reader found fault with me for allegedly presenting the woman as sacrificing herself rather than taking on an experience from which she would benefit.

In fact, I have long agreed with my correspondent’s point of view. I have often had occasion to quote author Mary Pipher on the subject: “Parents aging can be both a horrible and a wonderful experience. It can be the most growth-promoting time in the history of the family.

“Many people say, ‘I know this sounds strange, but that last year was the best year of my parents’ lives. I was my best. They were their best. Our relationships were the closest and strongest ever,’ or, ‘The pain and suffering were terrible. However, we all learned from it. I wouldn’t have wanted things to be different.’”

Like other caregivers, my correspondent had to confront American society’s taboos regarding death. She tells how “neighbors, friends, co-workers, and most family members can barely deal with the reality .  .  . and .  .  . therefore ‘check out’ of most  people’s lives, right when they need them the most.”

As she sees it, empowerment counts as one of the greatest needs of people approaching death. Her task became to “make them feel empowered while they were losing power.” This notion she understands as the need to feel respected and to have one’s dignity preserved.

She also insists on the need for advocacy on behalf of dying patients. This I heartily second, since people with serious disease very often feel too weak to make a case for themselves. From personal experience, I know what a difference it makes to have a family member there to represent my interests.

Nina Fiore credits her then boyfriend, now fiancé, both for understanding her need to be with her family members and for coming often to help out in the caregiving tasks. “I would not want to spend my life with someone who could not understand and do that,” she says.

This young woman indicts society for wishing to shield young people from contact with the dying. “How does youth mature,” she asks, “if it is sheltered from life’s basic events?” Further, she raises the question of priorities by asking “Is it more meaningful to bring home a paycheck than to be with people most important to you while they die?”

This latter question was presumably directed against my statement about not wanting my young daughter to be deflected from her own career by taking care of me when the time comes for my own decline and death. However, I do recognize care- giving to be one of the most valuable human experiences and, for young people, one of the most maturing.

Not basing one’s identity on a career, as Nina Fiore suggests, also shows wisdom although I feel that a career, seen in perspective, itself can contribute much to the maturing process. “I also never confused my work for who I am as a person and for what is truly important to me,” she adds.

Taking care of family members as they decline has helped my correspondent deal with guilt. “I can rest more easily in my own head, knowing I did all I could for them while they were alive,” she writes. It is liberating for her to feel relieved of the burden of guilt as she looks back on this experience that has helped redefine her sense of herself.

My correspondent, by the way, did not grow up privileged and affluent. Her parents were immigrants and her father did not have a high school education. He owned a small barber shop on Wall Street in Manhattan and his wife served as his accountant.

I have shared the views of one reader because I was deeply touched by her response. Hers was the kind of message that gives writing a weekly column added value.

Richard Griffin

When it came my turn, I knelt down in the midst of the group of some dozens of other Jesuit novices, all of them dressed in full-length black cassocks. Then the Master called on several of these other young men to tell me my faults.

This weekly monastic practice was called “chapter of faults,” and was considered a standard way of helping reform our behavior. It went back to the medieval era, if not earlier, thus qualifying as a time-honored tool of asceticism.

In theory, my fellow critics were supposed to focus only on externals─looking grim instead of cheerful, for instance─but in practice some people would say things, not because they would help the brother under criticism, but so as to relieve their own feelings about his irritating habits. At least, that’s what I found myself doing sometimes.

This critique of external conduct was supposed to help us correct our interior dispositions. Whether hearing a recital of my faults helped improve my character remains dubious. Even from the vantage point of five decades plus, such change is difficult to gauge.

Placing oneself at the mercy of peers was also humiliating. That, too, was seen as one of its advantages by the spiritual masters who presided over it. Striking a blow against pride was an important way of helping novices like me advance toward perfection.

I felt the sting of being subjected to comments on my behavior. Even those colleagues who were tactful and well disposed toward me could wound my psyche. It hurt to listen to peers whose sole duty, for the moment, was to point out publicly how I failed in my approach to the religious life.

However, the ritual did reveal to me my own rigidity, a trait that then loomed large in my personality. Many noticed how unbending I was in observing the rules and, especially, in judging my peers. “Brother often shows disapproval of others,” they would say, or something close to it.

I hope that they would no longer say this. I have long since changed my attitude toward rules, and I find that one of the great blessings of later life is the capacity to rejoice in my own imperfections.

In my twenties and thirties, however, I stood convinced that this was the authentic way to go. I considered myself as called to embark on the way of perfection as understood by the spiritual tradition in which I had grown up. At its deepest, I saw this summons as the will of God for me.

Though I retain respect for much of the ascetical tradition of my church and my former religious order, I came long ago to consider many aspects of it as inappropriate, even harmful, for me. It has a great intellectual and spiritual pedigree based in the New Testament, but this does not mean that all of its practices were good for me or for others.

I would add that my religious community, like many others, has long since reappraised these ascetic practices and abolished many of them. Today’s novices have probably never heard of the chapter of faults.

Rituals such as the chapter of faults rested on false assumptions. They simplified human psychology and presupposed a view of life very different from what most of our contemporaries share, thanks in large part to the discoveries of modern science. At this remove it is difficult for me to understand why I ever accepted procedures like this one without mounting serious objections.

Of course, I favor self-discipline and regret that it is so often misunderstood in our society. There is nothing wrong with bringing reason to bear on our emotional drives. I do not regret having learned how to lead a life in which the rational part of me would set limits on the instinctual.

However, the drive for perfection prevented vital parts of my personality from emerging. Instead of leading us to integrate the emotional with the intellectual, the novice master used to tell us to “beat it down,” meaning to subject our feelings to unyielding control. His regimen had the effect of emphasizing the worst parts of my character rather than the best.

Later life has led me to an easing of this pressure. Instead of pushing myself toward some ideal of moral perfection, I now feel content to live with myself as I am. That means accepting those impulses formerly labeled faults without worrying about their influence on me.

Of course, I feel concern about the effects of my actions on other people. It’s important for me not to offend them unnecessarily. Nor do I refuse opportunities to reach out to them with help, ideally with respect and affection.

But it seems better now to let the rhythm of life carry me along rather than to push myself according to some prefabricated agenda. This time offers the chance to look at life as a free-flowing stream that carries me along, not a construction site with me as architect.

Richard Griffin

Does prayer, offered by someone at a distance, help a sick person to get better? Can my talking with God on behalf of a friend in another place help heal that friend?

Surprisingly, these questions currently interest scientists. Some researchers around the country are busy trying to measure whether religious activity can influence bodily recovery.

Our federal government has funded several such studies, spending more than two million dollars to support them. This expenditure, initiated by the Bush administration, has drawn fire from some critics who call it a waste of public money, but supporters consider it an innovative way to test the effects of intercessory prayer.

My interest in a connection between prayer and healing has been heightened by a recent illness. During this time, friends galore promised me spiritual assistance for my recovery. “You’ll be in my prayers,” they typically assured me; at least one of them even told me to count on the prayers of a group to which she belongs.

I warmly welcome these offerings of spiritual support. It gladdens my heart to realize how many people care enough to make mention of me in their prayers. It pleases me to receive backing from people for whom the spiritual life has crucial importance.

But what, exactly, does this backing imply? Is there an implied message that praying for the sick will lead to improvement through divine action? Can I believe in the same hope of intervention by God?

I do not ask the questions that way, however. The most important issue for me is not whether the prayer of friends has the power to change my health for the better. I do not expect direct divine action to improve the functioning of my bodily organs.

Rather, I believe in the efforts of my physicians and other health care professionals to serve as intermediaries, directing toward me the goodness of God. Similarly, I look to family members who provide me with marvelous loving care at home; they embody divine providence toward me. So do visiting nurses and others who work for my healing.  

My approach finds support in a newly published book entitled Prayer: A History.

Its authors, Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, survey the practices of people around the globe. It is common for people to offer prayers in the hope of changing things for themselves and those they care about.

The writers offer many examples of traditional prayer that is integrated with a larger culture. This they contrast with the kind of prayer that is associated with modernity and considered a form of therapy. Deeply individualistic, it seems valued to the extent that it works.

With respect to prayer directed toward bodily healing, these authors emphasize its connection with community. “Healing prayer, we submit, is a work of repair, reknitting the social fabric that is frayed by illness or ruptured by death. It is a divine work, but its natural medium is a flourishing religious culture with a robust sense of communion between self and society, between society and the transcendent. Failing that sense of communion, healing prayer often takes on the appearance of a strange embellishment or an oddball obsession.”

I, too, see prayer as a divine work made meaningful by its connection with a culture and a community. This kind of prayer has graced every stage of my life. The community of faith has blessed all of the significant turning points of my life with prayers appropriate for the occasion.

Thus, as a Christian, I have received the traditional seven sacraments to prepare me for new situations. These prayers of the church continue to enhance my life in my eighth decade.

Countless members of this community, acting as individuals, have also offered prayers on my behalf throughout the years. To have been included by them has made me part of an extended world. I look back with pleasure on the many occasions when I have joined with people of other nations and traditions as we have stood together in raising up our needs to God.

Prayer thus strikes me as a fine remedy for isolation. At its best, it brings us into contact with many other people, a community much larger than our own, one made up of those who focus on spiritual gifts such as hope and love. I feel happy to be associated with those who pray for me and, if they are among the saints who will someday come marching in, I would like to be of their number.

As to the questions about prayer’s effects that scientists are studying, I await their findings with some interest. But I do not need for these researchers to demonstrate prayer’s value in quantitative terms.

I also take note of the Zaleskis’ sober conclusion that “the studies so far devised have proved inadequate to the task, not least because they depend on an unsophisticated understanding of God and prayer.”

Richard Griffin

Had you peered through the upper front window of my house, anytime over a recent two week period, you could have spied me sitting immobile, thoroughly captivated by a book. Family members considered that I was living temporarily in 19th century America, plunged as I was in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new work, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.

Thoroughly wrapped up in a fine book, I once more savored the benefits of holiday leisure time. It allowed me to appreciate the many satisfactions of reading about a man who, from his earliest years, was passionately devoted to books. As he was growing up, Lincoln had few books at his disposal; but those he managed to find─the King James Bible, the plays of Shakespeare, Pilgrim’s Progress─played a vital role in shaping the man he would become.

In approaching Lincoln, Goodwin faced a daunting challenge. After all, she had proposed to write yet another book about the person who has had more written about him than any other American. She needed to find a new way to make her subject and his era come alive for her readers. She therefore decided not to focus solely on this great, iconic figure, but rather to see him in relationship to his most formidable political competitors.

In April 1960, she evokes a moment when few realized that Lincoln would be a great man. William Henry Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, all thought themselves to have a better shot at the Republican nomination than did the hulking rail splitter from Kentucky and Illinois. And these three competitors did not soon thereafter give up the dream of becoming president.

But Lincoln, once president, made extraordinary use of his rivals. By bringing these men into his cabinet, along with Edwin Stanton and other leading politicians of the time, and managing to bring their skills to bear (without being stymied by their ambitions and often quixotic personality traits) Lincoln successfully steered his administration through the most trying time in American history.

Goodwin portrays the 16th president as a man of altogether rare qualities of personality. “An indomitable sense of purpose,” she writes in summary, “had sustained him through the disintegration of the Union and through the darkest months of the war, when he was called upon again and again to rally his disheartened countrymen, soothe the animosity of his generals, and mediate among members of his often contentious administration.”

We are reminded once more how dark this era was. The war casualties that amounted to more than 600,000 deaths on both sides (more than America has suffered in all its other wars combined) were a frightful assault on the emotions of their countrymen. How Lincoln himself managed to cope with the reports of deaths coming from the battlefields, and what he observed there first-hand, continues to provoke wonder.

Private griefs intruded as well. In that era, the death of young people was a staple of daily life. Salmon Chase, governor of Ohio before he became Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, endured the death of three wives, at least two of them in their 20s. During his presidency, Lincoln had to bear the death of his son Willie and the resulting terrible depression of his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln.

Throughout the four year struggle, the president held fast to his determination to save the union. It was only with time that he came to see how the emancipation of the people held as slaves was part of that same purpose. For a long time previously, Lincoln had been willing to compromise on the question of slavery so long as he could hold the union together.

It is painful to read that he did not consider Negroes equal to white people in intelligence and natural abilities. Moreover, he had held that, when freed, they should voluntarily go back to Africa.

Details about Lincoln’s lifestyle as president, as recounted by Goodwin, fascinated me. For instance, he used to attend the theater regularly, going to Grover’s Theater more than 100 times during his presidency. He found that plays would provide him with breaks from the often grim news of the war.

Even when pressed with business, he also would spend hours talking with friends, telling stories and anecdotes stemming from his past life. One of his favorite recreations would be to drop in at Seward’s house and talk with him far into the night.

Lincoln’s readiness to receive in the White House ordinary citizens in huge numbers revealed not only his interest in people and his patience. These public receptions also witnessed to his belief in the importance of the American populace feeling close to their government.  

The pathos of Lincoln’s assassination never fails to stir me, as it does almost everyone who reads about it. That a man who had saved the national community, as had Lincoln, could have been lost to the nation when it still sorely needed him still appears as a terrible tragedy.

Richard Griffin