BALL FIVE:

The minor leagues. The pennants along the foul lines read Pawtucket, Toledo, Columbus, Syracuse--the AAA farm clubs of the International League. The outfield is surrounded by billboards promoting barbecue stands and Oldsmobile dealerships. A Lions Club baritone salutes the star-spangled banner fluttering in dead center field, and the crowd settles back for the first pitch of a doubleheader between the Charleston Charlies and the Richmond Braves.

Jim Bouton, former sportscaster, former actor, former author, former 20-game winner for the New York Yankees, arrives at his usual post at the edge of the bleachers' behind the Richmond dugout. He can't go on the field and he's not willing to sit in the stands, so he loiters around the hot dog concession, looking around absently like a man who's lost his bearings. At the age of 39, Bouton no longer resembles a fresh-faced Army recruit, as he did in 1964 when he won two games in the World Series. The hair is short again, but it's graying, and the eyes are attracting crow's feet. To the fans in Richmond, he must look like somebody's dad trying to get a peek in the bullpen to see if his son is warming up. But it's his own youth that Bouton is searching for, and tomorrow night when the anthem concludes before the exhibition game with the Atlanta Braves, Jim Bouton will walk to the mound and face a major league club for the first time in eight years.

Comebacks among baseball pitchers are not unknown, but they are rare. Tommy John did it after a surgeon rebuilt his arm in 1974, and Mickey Lolich is trying to do it now with the San Diego Padres, after sitting out a year. What makes Bouton's attempt so exceptional is that he's been out of baseball since 1970, and when he quit he wasn't injured, he was washed-up. He hadn't pitched effectively for six years. But instead of falling into the panic many ballplayers face when their careers are finished, Bouton wrote Ball Four, one of the best-selling sports books of all time.

He was censured by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and reviled by the baseball establishment. ("It's the most derogatory thing and the worst thing for baseball I've ever seen," Joe Cronin, then president of the American League, said of the book. "He's got ballplayers sleeping with each other's wives. He's got them being Peeping Toms. He's even got them kissing each other. I've never read anything so bad in my whole life.") But a lot of ballplayers, even those who detested the book, gladly would have traded their seat in the dugout for a spot on the WABC Eyewitness News Team, or a part in a Robert Altman movie (The Long Goodbye), or a role in a TV sitcom (Ball Four, 1976's short-lived series based on Bouton's book). After all, what does a ballplayer have to look forward to when he's out of the game? If he's immortal, like Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle, maybe he can do some TV commercials, but if he's merely average, he'll be lucky to land a high-school coaching job. From that perspective, Jim Bouton was the most conspicuously successful ex-ballplayer since Chuck Connors, who hit .239 for the Cubs but went on to glory as the favorite Hollywood actor of Leonid Brezhnev.

That's all gone now, the television, the movies and even the money, sacrificed for a long-shot "comeback." Last year he was cut by two minor league teams and finished the summer with a bunch of kids on a class A club in Portland, Oregon, at the lowest level of professional baseball; and since spring training this season, when he was released by the Braves, he has been pitching batting practice for meal money for the Richmond club--and that as a favor from Ted Turner, owner of the Braves organization.

The young players are nice to him, but he's part of another world to them, a world of long-distance calls and funny tales about famous people. His equipment bag says "Washington Americans"--it's a prop from his TV series, when he played Jim Barton, "number 56 on your scorecard but number one in your hearts." The players kid about the yogurt he keeps in the icebox and the health food he eats on the road, but they admire the shape he's in. At 165 pounds, he is 20 pounds lighter than his Yankee days, and his body is as lithe and springy as an acrobat's. Still, it's a mystery why Bouton is among them. He is not even on their roster. When the team flies to Syracuse, or Toledo, Bouton tags along, just to pitch batting practice and perhaps talk to the general managers of the opposing teams, letting them know he's available. So far, no offers. "If I don't make the big leagues soon, the money's going to run out," Bouton says. Today, the day before his big opportunity, Bouton sold his house in Englewood, New Jersey. "I've even taken all the money I put away for a college education for my kids, that's all gone." Tomorrow, if he doesn't pitch well, the comeback of Jim Bouton is over.

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