Foul Ball

  “If we raise enough money,” said Chip, “we could do in one year what we had originally planned to do over five years.”

  Chip began crunching numbers. I sketched bleachers and locker room floor plans. We told Paula and Cindy we were just playing.

  But the Parks Commission wasn’t just playing. A few days after our meeting with Ruberto, they voted to recommend that lame-duck Mayor Hathaway break off negotiations with Jonathan Fleisig regarding the 2004 baseball season. Evidently, weeks after his license with Pittsfield had expired—following another disastrous season at Wahconah Park—Fleisig was still using the city as a bargaining chip to get a better deal in New Haven, Connecticut.

  By now, you can guess what happened next.

  Three days after Fleisig denied he was negotiating with New Haven, he announced that he was moving his team there. And two days after that, in a Berkshire Eagle editorial—GOODBYE TO THE BLACK BEARS—our man Ever-Scrib wrote:

  The loss of the Black Bears almost assuredly marks the end of Pittsfield’s proud history in professional baseball, a day that became inevitable with the defeat of a proposal for a new stadium… and a crumbling Wahconah Park looks forward to a lonely old age.

  A stock Eagle editorial with a Black Bears insert.

  Our second meeting with Mayor Elect Ruberto was a lunch affair featuring Cindy’s famous white bean and escarole soup, with turkey sandwich fixings. The new additions to the group included Paula, Cindy, and our other partner, Eric Margenau, who was willing to give Pittsfield another shot.

  “Hell yeah,” Eric said. “I’m with you guys, all the way.”

  Now it was up to our wives.

  After the raving over the soup had died down, Chip and Eric and I laid out our dream scenario: We would raise money in a limited public offering, mostly from Pittsfield investors if possible, and spend at least $1 million on Wahconah Park by Opening Day 2005. The rest of the deal would essentially match what we had proposed in 2001.

  Ruberto’s eyes got wide at the mention of a million dollars.

  “You think you could really do that?” he said, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.

  “We’d probably end up spending closer to $1.5 million,” I said, opening my big mouth, “but we couldn’t commit to that right now.”

  Ruberto’s cheeks reddened at the possibilities.

  And we weren’t finished. We said if things went well with the money raising and the permitting, we might be able to break ground as early as July 2004, only eight months away. But we’d need to get a license agreement signed as quickly as possible so we could start meeting with architects and engineers, while Chip got to work on a prospectus.

  Now we were into the nuts and bolts. Ruberto questioned Eric about getting a team. Eric explained that the Northeast and Atlantic leagues were in a state of flux, but that they were always looking for strong ownership groups and good places to play. And we had both.

  “I have to tell you this makes me very nervous,” said Paula, who gets uneasy when things go a little too smoothly. She looked directly at Ruberto. “Our first experience was so unpleasant. How can we be sure that it won’t happen again?”

  “Paula, I promise you it will be different this time,” said Ruberto, who was very courteous to both wives throughout the meeting. “You have my word on that.”

  “He’s got some friends who aren’t speaking to him,” said Potsy, with an admiring smile and a nod toward Ruberto. Potsy wanted us to know that the mayor elect was spending some political capital.

  “There are a few people we’re not going to win over,” said Ruberto, “and that’s just the way it is.”

  He suggested that it would make his job a little bit easier if I “toned things down a bit” with Foul Ball. Suddenly awash in team spirit, I agreed to cut short my promotional tour.

  “I’ll keep the dates I’ve already scheduled,” I said. “But at least now I can talk about a happy ending. And a gutsy mayor.”

  Ruberto smiled proudly and promised again that we would have his full support.

  “The letter from the city is crucial,” I said. “We’ve always had the people behind us. If we have the government, too, the big boys will have to go along. And we’ll eventually win them over, too. If we succeed, what are they going to do, sit on the sidelines and pout?”

  “I’ll get a letter drafted,” said Ruberto.

  The conversation was great and so was the soup. By the time the meeting was over, Cindy was pouring leftovers into a plastic container for the mayor elect; he was smiling and shaking our hands, and we were calling him Jimmy.

  The postgame analysis went well:

  Cindy: Jimmy Ruberto seems like a very decent man.

  Paula: I liked him. And I didn’t think I was going to.

  Me: The book doesn’t seem to have hurt us.

  Chip: Without Foul Ball, we never would have been invited back in the first place. The book made it clear that we really did have a good proposal and that we really were treated badly.

  So what should we do?

  The tipping point came from Cindy.

  “Well, I think they should do it,” she said to Paula. “The boys have so much fun together.”

  “That’s true,” said Chip.

  “Look what’s happened here,” I said, like a high school civics teacher. “An entire city has turned itself around. Potsy’s right, it’s a helluva story. It’s democracy in action.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Paula.

  The new year got off to a fascinating start.

  On January 2, 2004, his first day in office, Mayor Ruberto announced that he was interested in bringing an independent minor league baseball team back to Pittsfield, “but only if the owner is interested in making a significant investment, roughly in the neighborhood of $1 million to $1.5 million, to renovate Wahconah Park.”

  Chip and I laughed out loud. This was quite a request since no owner had ever invested more than $75,000 in Wahconah Park, and the last guy to do that, Fleisig, had just left town because he was losing money. How could the mayor propose such a thing?

  It was so hard to absorb that it took Ever-Scrib until January 11th to respond. In an Eagle editorial—OUT AT HOME—he wrote:

  It is difficult to imagine why anyone would invest $1 or $1.5 million in an aging ballpark that is beyond hope of reclamation…. Pittsfield has gotten itself into a bad situation… and there may be no getting out of it.

  The mayor’s request was pretty bold from our perspective, as well. We had yet to receive the letter inviting us back to Pittsfield that the mayor had promised. A draft finally arrived two days later, for our approval. The only problem was the wording. Specifically, phrases like:

  … we invite you to speak with us about your interest… there may be areas of shared vision… which could form the basis for a broader dialogue… we look forward to a possible meeting in the near future.

  Chip and I were on the phone with each other in a flash.

  “This is bullshit,” I said. “Our interest? Areas of shared vision? A possible meeting in the near future? Get me rewrite!”

  “I agree,” said Chip. “It’s not what we talked about.”

  “The mayor needs to understand that it’s not a done deal and that we need to be won over,” I said. “I once proposed marriage to Wahconah Park. Now let them propose to us.”

  “To have any meaning for investors or the leagues, not to mention us,” said Chip, “the letter has to clearly demonstrate that we’re wanted.”

  “Exactly.”

  So, Chip and I edited our own letter of invitation. The mayor then had it copied on city stationery, got it signed by city officials, and released it to the media (See the letter preceding this chapter).

  Whew. You’ve got to watch these guys.

  Then the real fun began.

  After back-to-back front page stories in the Berkshire Eagle—NEW MAYOR MAKES PITCH TO BOUTON and OVERTURE TO BOUTON GETS GOOD REVIEWS—poor Ever-Scrib se
t himself up again. In a January 18 editorial—RUBERTO’s INVITATION TO PLAY BALL—he wrote:

  With the devastating failure of the new stadium initiative… Wahconah Park is of no use to the city rotting away empty… the Bouton group left few bridges unburned three years ago… it failed to land a team… the mayor has given them a chance to put up or shut up. We’ll see which option they choose.

  It was satisfying to see the Eagle trying to guess what might happen for a change, rather than know in advance.

  After the city’s stunning invitation Chip and I received a flurry of phone calls and emails:

  “I nearly fell into my cereal bowl this morning.”

  “Please consider the mayor’s invitation and help keep our beautiful Wahconah Park. It’s so necessary, and you’re the ones to do it!”

  “If you need volunteers, you can count on me.”

  “Pleeeeese say yes.”

  And from Steve Picheny, “Congratulations. They had to do it. It’s the right thing. Let me know if I can help.”

  “You’re on the team,” I told him.

  It was a wonderful feeling. Chip and I were back in the dream business again. Of course we said yes a week later. How could we not, with such a warmly worded invitation.

  As I traveled around the country, finishing up my abbreviated book tour, I enjoyed telling everyone about the new happy ending in Pittsfield. It always came as a big surprise, and people in the audience would smile and sometimes applaud. It seemed to restore their faith in humanity, which hadn’t been having a very good year.

  The most rewarding venues are colleges. With Foul Ball cutting across several disciplines, I was invited to speak at classes with names like Public Policy (Duke), Urban Studies (University of Illinois), History of Media (Rutgers), Stadiums, Politics, & Media (Villanova), Baseball & Society (NYU), and Journalism (Columbia), among others.

  Afterward, I’d sit around with the students and talk about whatever interested them. “What can people do?” they’d ask regarding the lack of democracy. “Get involved and take notes,” I’d say. As the philosopher Walter Benjamin said, “Every true story is useful.”

  I especially liked meeting with the journalism students. Young as they were, they all wanted to have an impact—immediately if not sooner. After I would finish speaking (before the happy ending) I thought a few go-getters were going to march straight to Pittsfield and try to get to the bottom of things. One of them actually did come, just to look around. I have high hopes for that kid.

  The problem is, where would he find work? Certainly not at the Eagle. And not at WAMC, the local public radio station that venerates the work of investigative journalists but doesn’t have one on staff. What WAMC does have is a news director who at least saw how we’d been treated in Pittsfield.

  “What they did to you guys was disgusting,” Susan Arbetter told me, during a taping at WAMC on the subject of Foul Ball.

  Unfortunately, no such sentiment ever made it onto the air. Instead, what listeners heard was an edited two-part piece with balanced quotes, but which omitted any discussion of the media—WAMC or the Eagle. Their role in the story, Arbetter explained, would be saved for a guest appearance by me on WAMC’s Media Project—which she later said would be “better on Vox Pop because it’s twice as long.” But a guest appearance never happened.

  What did happen, however, is a good illustration of how WAMC has whitewashed both itself and the Eagle on a story that, if it had been properly covered, might not have been so “disgusting.” The following is a verbatim transcript of the comments of WAMC’s Executive Director Alan Chartock, which aired on the Media Project shortly after Foul Ball came out.

  Jim Bouton, the famous Ball Four author, wanted to have a baseball stadium in Pittsfield. He wanted the city government to give him a long-term lease on this thing. And he got very angry when he didn’t get it—when he and his two business partners, and I emphasize the word business partners, didn’t get what they wanted. And so now the question is: Did the media let him down? And he wrote a long book about it, and I’m mentioned throughout the book, and called this and that, and he said I’m a courageous guy when I took on GE, but when it came to “my baseball stadium, he wasn’t there to help me, and that’s probably because he has a column in the Berkshire Eagle, and the Berkshire Eagle was involved in getting the other kind of stadium, as opposed to the little stadium”—it’s a long story, but the point is, people will say whatever they want and Jim Bouton has a lot of power. He had a full page in the Editor & Publisher magazine, a full-page story. He’s always saying ‘poor little me,’ but in fact, he’s got all these friends, and he manipulates the media shamelessly!

  It was that kind of non-reporting that led me to accept an invitation to speak at the National Conference on Media Reform in Madison, Wisconsin, back in November, 2003. The event, attended by media activists from all over the country and many members of Congress, was organized to challenge (successfully, so far) the FCC’s decision to relax the rules against cross ownership of media properties. The sponsors of the conference saw Foul Ball as a case study of what can happen when too much power rests in too few hands.

  A mini-example of media power is WAMC, which already owns twelve stations in the Northeast. “The problem,” said Jeff Cohen, founder of the media watch group FAIR, “is that when WAMC buys a new station it frequently replaces the well respected media program CounterSpin, with its own Media Project, where the hosts just sit around and laugh.”

  A far greater problem, of course, exists on the national level, where one of the leading voices arguing in favor of media monopolies happens to be Berkshire Eagle owner Dean Singleton. Can you imagine if Singleton also owned a television station in Pittsfield, which he could have done had the courts not blocked the FCC rule changes?

  Two weeks after the Conference on Media Reform, I was a guest on NOW with Bill Moyers. Moyers had heard me on a radio show in Wisconsin and had his producer call me. The show aired during a PBS Television fund-raising drive and generated a lot of phone calls.

  According to a NOW producer, “the show pledged better than it ever has, something like $2,500 per minute. To give you some idea how good this is, the average is $1,000.” The next day the Amazon.com sales ranking for Foul Ball jumped up from 5,267 to 33.

  The show’s producers also received letters from lawyers for GE and MediaNews Group, and from publisher Peter Osnos of PublicAffairs. They essentially told Moyers their side of the story and demanded that he retract mine. (If you enjoy a good food fight you can read their letters, and Moyers’ and my responses, on the web site: www.foulball.com.)

  The lawyers’ only valid critique was that Foul Ball should not have been described as an “investigative report,” but rather a diary. Being the good journalist that he is, Moyers apologized, on the air, for presenting my story as truth, rather than “truth as [Bouton] saw it.”

  “That, of course, is why a man writes a book,” said Moyers, “to tell his version of things.” Moyers then invited the letter writers “to come on this show and give their version.” They declined.

  Speaking of truth, an interesting bit of information was inadvertently revealed by the lawyer for MediaNews Group. “The Eagle was contributing $2 million in cash,” the lawyer said in his letter to Moyers. “It was to receive no benefit in return, other than the right to name the stadium.”

  I nearly fell off my chair. Naming rights! Who knew that naming rights were part of the deal? Certainly not the readers of the Berkshire Eagle, who have yet to be informed as I write this. What are naming rights worth? According to Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal, the average naming rights deal for a single A, affiliated team in 2001 was $3.2 million for 13.6 years! Some contribution.

  Bill Moyers believes the media monopoly story is the most important one in America today because it determines what all the other stories are and how they are covered. I agree.

  March 8, 2004 was a nice day. Besides being my sixty-fifth birthday, it was the
day the Pittsfield Parks Commission voted unanimously to approve the license agreement between the city and Wahconah Park, Inc., which was the name of our fledgling corporation.

  As always, when Wahconah Park is on the agenda, the little room at Springside House was filled with supporters. Dave Potts, Betty Quadrozzi, Elaine Soldato, Sue Gordon, Jim Moran, Katy Roucher, Thelma Barzottini, Tim Zwingelstein, and the rest of the gang. This time, however, there was a festive air, with people sensing that something good might happen.

  As Chip said, “It’s just about show time, Jim.”

  This was a special meeting of the Parks Commission—the opposite of the ad hoc postponements we faced in 2001—and we were the only item on the agenda. We even had an opening act: Mayor Ruberto and City Solicitor Chris Speranzo, who, with Chip’s help, had drafted the agreement. Plus our own sexy cheerleaders: Paula and Cindy, all dressed up for the TV cameras and the anticipated dinner celebration afterwards.

  The mayor led it off. “We need to look at the level of commitment we are seeing from this group,” said Ruberto. “This is a $1.5 million investment made by a private group to improve a publicly owned facility. I strongly urge you to welcome this group to Pittsfield.”

  City Solicitor Speranzo explained that the agreement was “the same performance based concept they had proposed in 2001,” that it was “non-exclusive, allowing for community events and sports groups,” and that “the maintenance provisions differ from previous park licenses in relieving the City of all responsibilities.”

  For some reason, it sounded so much better coming from them than it had from Chip and me.

  “It’s the best license agreement I’ve seen in my forty years here,” said Commissioner John Marchesi. “It’s the first one I could understand.”

  Then it was time for the Chip and Jim portion of the program. This was the moment we’d been waiting for, and I actually had butterflies as I walked to the front of the room. It was like taking the mound in the World Series, knowing you’ve got your good stuff.