Before writing Ball Four, Bouton was a 20-game winner who pitched in the World Series.

FORBES: Baseball Mythbusting: Was That a Clutch Hit? Or Did the Pitcher Just Choke?

Jim Bouton, the controversial author and former Yankees pitcher, referred to Miller as a mild-mannered professor who immediately became your friend.

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And a report prepared by France's finance ministry criticised SocGen's procedures for monitoring its trades, adding to the pressure on Daniel Bouton, the bank's chairman, to step down.

ECONOMIST: Business this week

Practitioners throw a quirky pitch of unpredictable trajectory, requiring "the fingertips of a safecracker and the mind of a Zen Buddhist, " says former pitcher Jim Bouton in the film.

WSJ: R.A. Dickey in 'Knuckleball!': Stuck in the Bullpen

Daniel Bouton, SocGen's boss, has argued that Mr Kerviel could easily conceal the vast positions he took because he had previously worked in the back office, so was familiar with the system of controls.

ECONOMIST: Soci��t�� G��n��rale

But when I first put forth this idea of a relationship between clutch hitting and a pitcher choking in a Wall Street Journal column several years ago, I got a call from Jim Bouton.

FORBES: Baseball Mythbusting: Was That a Clutch Hit? Or Did the Pitcher Just Choke?

Yet Daniel Bouton, SocGen's boss, thinks that the two banks have too many overlapping branches to make such returns possible: in regulated France, you cannot simply close branches and sack people, which is, in part, how banks in America and Britain have increased returns.

ECONOMIST: French banking