When I was a kid, pretty much all baseball players were model citizens. We knew this because the sports pages told us so. Day after day, sportswriters informed us that these athletes were shining beacons of moral goodness, a credit to their teams and communities, and the kind of people who boys like me would do well to emulate.

Jim Bouton put an end to that. I read Ball Four, Bouton’s magnum opus about what professional baseball really was like, when I was 12 or so. That’s when I learned that lots of baseball players lie, cheat on their wives, drink to excess, pop amphetamines like Chiclets, have the overall moral turpitude of a creepy guy in a trench coat — and, in that pre-union era, were treated like chattel by short-sighted, cheapskate owners.

The book also was funny. Achingly funny. Stop-and-grab-your-sides funny. But there was a pathos underneath it, as Bouton outlined his struggles to maintain his career as a professional baseball player. He was a knuckleball-throwing reliever who, in the season documented in the book, bounced between the now-gone Seattle Pilots of the American League, a minor league club, and the Houston Astros. He kept a diary of his experience, which became the basis for the book.

When Ball Four came out, you would have thought Bouton was dealing drugs to toddlers based on the amount of outrage it generated. Old-school sportswriters, used to living cushy lives in exchange for not reporting on what players did off the field, looked like fools and acted like bullies in response (a trait shared to this day by the biggest hacks in the field, I’d note). A lot of players went completely ballistic as their trade secrets were exposed and their spouses started asking way too many questions.

And Ball Four became a huge best-seller. Kids like me lapped it up, and so did plenty of other people.

My friends and I all started quoting lines from Joe Shultz, the Pilots’ manager. Bouton portrayed him as a good-natured semi-dolt who motivated players by pointing out that, once the game was over, they could all pound some Budweisers in the clubhouse. “Hija, blondie. How’s the old tomato?” Schultz once asked a woman he spotted in the stands (or so Bouton claimed).

“Ball Four” was full of gutter talk like that, and pervy acts involving players and baseball groupies. A lot of this could make me a little embarrassed today, but I found it super-fascinating at the time because…well, tween boy.

For example, the fact that players loved staying in L-shaped hotel buildings for the viewing-into-other-rooms opportunities they provided was not something that had occurred to me. Comparing detailed thoughts about women in the stands — or the women they were with the night before — while burning time in the dugout was not the kind of game-only focus I thought my heroes experienced.

The book outlined practical jokes involving Icy Hot balm in jockstraps and talcum powder in hair dryers. Bouton claimed Whitey Ford (I think) once raffled off a ham in the clubhouse, but there was no ham and no winner. This was just one of the risks of a game of chance, Ford explained.

Post-Ball Four, Bouton became a pariah to many players, but a hero to many of us. He parlayed the experience into a post-baseball career as a sportscaster, writer, actor, investor and more. The phony sheen over baseball players — and the owners who abused them — was pulled away forever, to what I’d claim was the benefit of everyone. Sportswriters had to act like journalists instead of team employees.

The game, stripped of this phony nonsense, exploded in popularity. Players banded together and got paid. And a whole new genre of tell-all sports books (none as good as this one, but some nonetheless enjoyable) was spawned.

Bouton died earlier this week. He was 80. I think I’ll read Ball Four again if I can find a copy.

This is an Akita. It’s an internet appliance that claims to monitor your entire network and block suspicious intruders. It’s the kind of thing that anyone who has interest in adding smart home features should add to their network to keep away prying eyes (or worse).

For me, though, it’s going to be a $94 paperweight, assuming I ever see it at all.

This is the story of how I signed up for a Kickstarter project that allegedly was three months from delivery, and how I’m sitting here 18 months later, having been assured that my appliance is going to arrive Real Soon Now. It’s a tale of destroyed credibility and how a company can raise suspicions they’re up to something nefarious, even if they’re not. It’s also why I’ll avoid product Kickstarters in the future and wait for products to hit the retail channel.

I first heard of the Akita on a couple of tech websites, which wrote about the appliance and how useful something like that would be in the home. The stories were fairly glowing, and I assumed review copies of the product had been sent around. When I checked it out on Kickstarter in January 2018, the manufacturer said it expected to be shipping in April.

Now, you always have to be a little careful on Kickstarter. It’s designed to raise money for startup projects, and even the best-intentioned startup deadlines slip. It also makes a potential platform for people who might be up to no good, but given the publicity around this product, that outcome seemed unlikely. I still thought I might be waiting until, say, July, but I dropped down my $94 for the Akita.

I was far from alone. Others saw the need for this product and liked the price, and it raised over $900,000 on Kickstarter and Indigogo.

It didn’t take long for the bad news to start, though. Akita assured us all in February 2018 that production had started — yet somehow, as the proposed shipping windows started opening up, people weren’t getting their products.

In July 2018, we were informed of a “short shipping delay” necessitated by packing modifications, followed by various “shipping updates” (short version: Most of you aren’t getting your product soon) every few weeks through the end of the year. All of these were put behind a password wall so only backers could read them.

I gave up at that point. Other people weren’t so quiet, and they’ve posted more than 1,900 often angry missives in Akita’s comments section.

But hope springs eternal, and in March and May, Akita put out shipping updates. At the end of May, I got an actual tracking notice, although the product allegedly remains en route from Hong Kong to the USA at this writing, with an uncertain arrival date.

Not that I’ll ever use it for its intended purpose. The creators of this product lost my trust, and this product is all about trust. I’ll keep it as a paperweight, though, just as a reminder of a lesson learned.