Foul Ball

According to the union, an unscrupulous government could grant a short-term license (our eighteen-month initial term) to a “sham corporation,” to restore a city asset with a “required amount” of the sham corporation’s money (our $1.5 million). Once the project was completed, the government could simply not renew the license, thereby getting an improved public asset without having to go through the Bid Laws. Of course.

  That a city would even bother going through such a process tells you something about the Bid Laws, but never mind. When lawyers talk like that, the best thing to do is humor them. So we said we understood the union’s position, strained as it was, and that we would make whatever revisions the Attorney General deemed necessary.

  In the car on the way back, Chip and Chris talked about how to revise the license to eliminate the offending language. But whatever might happen, it was abundantly clear that the union’s power derived not from the strength of its argument but rather from its ability to delay our project.

  Or possibly derail it.

  “This is like a slasher movie,” said Chip, summing things up, “and the vintage game was that moment in the story where everyone is feeling safe, and suddenly…”

  The whole business with the union was a drain on our time and energy. Especially with the problems we were having with Dave Potts and the parks commissioners. And we were still trying to raise money, complete our permitting, get a better handle on our construction costs, and prepare for the September 4 game.

  Paula tried to slow me down whenever she could.

  “After dinner and a nice glass of wine,” she said one evening, “let’s say we do something romantic, like sit on the porch and enjoy each other’s company.”

  “Fine,” I said, looking at my watch. “What time would you like to be romantic?”

  The most disheartening thing was the money.

  In spite of the fact that we had a vastly improved story to tell—our vision for Wahconah Park, our concept of marketing an experience, our plan to put Pittsfield in the national spotlight, and our ability to deliver, all now a matter of record—we weren’t getting anywhere with investors.

  The uncertainty about the Bid Laws, which we were ethically and legally bound to mention in our presentations, was now a problem. And it didn’t help that our prospectus was now invalid, including as it did our yet-to-be-revised-and-approved license agreement. Still, if we could raise $1.2 million (including our $250,0000) before the July 3 game, what were the odds that we wouldn’t be able to raise anything after the game?

  Having struck out in Pittsfield, we were now traveling all the way to New York City looking for investors. We made four presentations at Mickey Mantle’s restaurant, before large groups of prime candidates assembled by owner Bill Liederman, who was now on our board. These were guys with deep pockets who loved baseball and wanted to invest because they knew me or had seen or heard about our vintage game. Nada. Zip. “It looks interesting, Jim, we’ll give you a call.”

  Meanwhile, as Cindy said, “The bills just keep on coming.”

  An accounting of the July 3 game—which included the ESPN-inspired improvements that we hadn’t planned on making until after we closed on our financing—showed we lost $47,000 on a cash flow basis. Which meant that Paula had to write another check, bringing our share of the expenses to $94,000.

  “I love you, Babe,” she said with a sigh. “We’re going to hell in a hand basket, but we’re going together.”

  “We’ll get it all back when this thing is a success,” I said.

  And I still believed that.

  On August 13, a decision came down from the Attorney General’s office that was just as we had anticipated. Here’s the key wording:

  [W]e have identified evidence that the City has retained control over the construction, which raises concerns about whether it is subject to the competitive bidding laws… a term of 18 months suggests that a license may have been structured to circumvent the bidding laws, since many similar construction projects take this long to complete… by the terms of the license certain construction is required…. However, this is a close case… we remand this matter to the City for further action in accordance with the foregoing opinion.

  By the next day, “in accordance with the foregoing opinion,” Chip and Chris had identified two ways in which the license could be revised:

  1. The initial term was increased from eighteen months to fifteen years (still cancelable at any time if we failed to meet our performance criteria).

  2. The “requirement” to spend $1.5 million was removed (we’d still be responsible for all repairs and maintenance—structural and otherwise—year round).

  But the clock was ticking. We were already a week past the date we had set for submitting our final prospectus. Without a license, we had no prospectus. Without a prospectus, there was no point meeting with potential investors. And without new investors we were stalled at $1.2 million.

  The question was, How soon could the mayor and the Parks Commission sign the license and get it back to the Attorney General for his approval?

  “Right now the mayor is on vacation,” said Speranzo. “And I’m leaving this afternoon for my vacation. It will have to wait until we get back.”

  Did I mention that we didn’t have a professional team yet?

  To round out the week, on August 20, the always reliable Ever-Scrib surprised no one with his editorial CITY MUST PLAY BY THE RULES.

  The recommendation of the state attorney general’s office… constitutes a much-needed reminder to City Hall that the ballpark belongs to the city and is not the private plaything of Jim Bouton and Chip Elitzer, even if they behave as if it is.

  In an obvious rebuke to Ever-Scrib, that evening a small tornado roared through Wahconah Park and lifted the roof off one of the clubhouses (and set it back down again) that we had planned to remove. The tornado also flattened a section of fence that we had earmarked for demolition.

  At least somebody was on our side.

  On August 21, Paula and I flew to the Netherlands to visit family for ten days. We hated to leave Chip and Cindy with all the work leading up to the September 4 game, but the plans had been made before the game was scheduled. And we didn’t want to disappoint the grandchildren.

  I wouldn’t be missing any investor presentations because there weren’t going to be any without a revised license agreement. For some reason, the mayor still hadn’t decided what he wanted to do about the “further action” recommended by the Attorney General’s office. How about his signature on the license revised by his own city solicitor?

  Our new drop-dead date for construction, which we kept to ourselves, was November 1. Not that it seemed to matter to anyone but the Boutons and the Elitzers.

  It was in the front room of my stepdaughter’s house in Amsterdam, overlooking a canal, that I received my emails from Chip.

  August 24, Speranzo to Chip:

  > I cannot be sure that any action is going to be

  > taken because I haven’t spoken to the mayor.

  August 27, Chip to Speranzo:

  > Any chance you could send me a revised agreement

  > this weekend?

  August 30, Chip to Speranzo:

  > You and I should hammer out the final draft

  > of a possible revised agreement today in order

  > to have a document to discuss with the mayor.

  It was like watching grass grow. Or, in Amsterdam, watching the rain pelt the cobblestones. I couldn’t stand it, and I flew home—by myself—two days earlier than planned. Don’t ask.

  On September 1, Chip and I met with the mayor in his office. He began by complaining about the Attorney General.

  “The AG didn’t do us any favors,” said Ruberto. “Now we’ve got a real problem on our hands.”

  We told Ruberto we weren’t worried about the AG, because we believed he would approve the revisions. Our enemy was time. The mayor needed to sign the license and get it to the Parks Commission for their approval. r />
  Ruberto pressed his lips tightly together. He looked distressed.

  “Guys, we don’t have the votes,” he said, meaning the commissioners. “The fifteen years and removing the $1.5 million are a very big problem.”

  “The problem was created by the union and the Attorney General,” said Chip, with some intensity. “Everybody understands that.”

  “How could we not have the votes?” I said, incredulous. “Even revised, it’s still far better than any license the city has ever had.”

  “The word I’m getting,” said Ruberto, “is that they’re not there.”

  “I can’t believe they’ve already decided,” said Chip. “We haven’t even made our case for why the revisions are necessary.”

  “By the way,” I said, as cautiously as I could, “what’s happened to Potsy? He’s been acting strange lately.”

  “I don’t know what’s happened to David,” said Ruberto, shaking his head, as if he’d been wondering the same thing. “But you’ve got to get him on your side. He’s important here.”

  Potsy was important for the simple reason that people believed him. He had been right about the Civic Authority, hadn’t he? That gave him the street cred for whatever came next—against Ruberto, then for Ruberto and against Hathaway, for us and against Fleisig (although Fleisig was his own worst enemy). Potsy was a one-man word-of-mouth campaign, for or against any person or proposition. The question was, who was he for or against at the moment?

  From the mayor’s office, Chip and I went to Wahconah Park, where the Hillies were having their final practice before The Deciding Game, as we were billing the September 4 contest against the Senators. And who should we see sitting in the stands but Potts and Gene Nadeau. A perfect opportunity to get things back on track.

  So we walked over and struck up a conversation that lasted through practice and into the darkness at Wahconah Park. It was not exactly warm and fuzzy. Potts and Nadeau were a matched set—unsmiling, arms-folded prosecutors with a case of particulars. They revisited our past sins—ticket prices, anthem singer, Girardi’s, Dave Southard—and we tried to understand how stuff like that could possibly put us on opposite sides of something so important to the community. And to them.

  The upshot of the conversation?

  “You should have hired Potsy as a consultant,” said Nadeau.

  Say it ain’t so, Potsy.

  But he didn’t.

  On September 4, the Pittsfield Hillies secured worldwide bragging rights for vintage baseball by beating the Hartford Senators 12–4 on a beautiful afternoon at Wahconah Park. The paid attendance of 1,503 was less than we had hoped for but still pretty good for a Labor Day weekend, when the tourists have gone home and kids have left for college.

  The honor of throwing out the first pitch, which once would have gone to Potsy, went to ninety-three-year-old Christine Ungewitter, a life-long Pittsfield resident who remembered rooting for the Hillies at Wahconah Park when she was a little girl.

  “Why do they want me?” Christine asked her son George when he told her we were looking for an original Hillies fan. “A lot of people went to those games.”

  The Wahconah Park Times—our broadsheet game program—updated fans on the Attorney General’s ruling and the need for a revised license agreement. “Ironically,” we wrote, “the only way that the Company can proceed with its plan to spend over $1.5 million on the ballpark before Opening Day 2005 may be for the City to eliminate the requirement that it do so!”

  By game time, however, weeks after the Wahconah Park Times had gone to press, we realized we were not going to be able to raise more than our current $1.2 million. So we adjusted our plan as follows: Not counting the $250,000 of our own money we would have already spent, we’d put another $500,000 into the ballpark by Opening Day 2005 and keep the remaining $450,000 for working capital. Future improvements would be paid for out of cash flow.

  Chip and I were not happy about the prospect of investing only half as much money in Wahconah Park by Opening Day as we had wanted. It would not only cut into our plan to market a fully renovated ballpark, but it might look as if we had reneged on the agreement. Our enemies would be happy to ignore the fact that we’d been well on our way to reaching our goal of $2.8 million until the carpenters filed a Bid Protest, and that $750,000 invested by Opening Day was still ten times what Fleisig or anyone else had ever invested in Wahconah Park in a single year.

  On September 9, Chip and I stopped at Clark & Green to pick up the drawings reflecting our scaled-back plan, and headed for Pittsfield to meet with the mayor and Chris Speranzo.

  “When we accepted your invitation to come back,” Chip began, “we said there was no limit to what we could accomplish if we all worked together. We need to do that here.”

  “Guys, you gotta work within the Bid Laws,” said Ruberto, with obvious frustration. “That’s the only way this is going to get done.”

  But why was he frustrated? It had been nearly a month since the AG had invited the city to take action, which now amounted to nothing more than the mayor’s signature on a piece of paper. Meanwhile, our time, our money, and a wonderful project were going down the drain.

  “Why can’t you sign the license?” I said. “Send it to the AG and see what he says? If it was a ‘close call’ before the revisions, it should be a no-brainer now.”

  “The AG is not going to help us,” said Ruberto. “He never should have ruled on it in the first place. Damn!”

  “Chris said he believed the revisions would pass muster,” said Chip, recalling his collaboration with Speranzo on the language.

  Ruberto looked cornered.

  “That was my initial response,” said Chris Speranzo, the loyal employee.

  “We can’t circumvent the Bid Laws,” Ruberto said firmly, once again ignoring the point we had all made in the AG’s office that the Bid Laws didn’t apply to us. “I can’t sign it and I won’t sign it.”

  Won’t is one thing, can’t is another. Why couldn’t he?

  Ruberto brought up the financial plight of the city and the difficulties he faced trying to renegotiate the contracts of a large number of municipal unions. He implied that a tough stance against the carpenters could hurt him with the cops, the firemen, and the teachers.

  “I have to think of the city,” said Ruberto.

  In the game of Find A Reason For Not Signing, this was a brilliant move, casting Ruberto as the savior of the city budget and us as bankrupters!

  But then it was Chip’s turn.

  “We can help you with that,” he said. “We’ll provide the political cover you need. We’ll lobby the parks and the council to strongly request that you sign the revised license and send it to the AG.”

  “The unions will see that your hand is being forced,” I added.

  “I can’t have you do that,” said Ruberto.

  “We’ll do it on our own,” said Chip.

  “I won’t be any part of that,” Ruberto said, firmly.

  “We understand,” said Chip. “Leave it to us.”

  It was hard to tell what Ruberto was thinking. He looked upset, but why? Was he afraid that our lobbying would be traced to him, making things worse with the unions? Or did he just not want to be pressured into signing the license in the first place, because he couldn’t sign it?

  The whole thing was exasperating. Here we were again, three years later, fighting political battles that Ruberto had promised we wouldn’t have to fight. But what choice did we have? We were too far in, financially and emotionally, to just walk away.

  Acting on his belief that “transparency brings people along,” Chip sent an email to the mayor and each of the parks commissioners and city councilors. In it he listed a dozen successes, including: marketing the 1791 bylaw; the Hillies; ESPN; the $1.2 million; the completion of our engineering, zoning, and permitting; and “the diligent work of our families on behalf of Wahconah Park without pay.”

  He listed three challenges: getting a professional team;
the lack of Pittsfield investors; and the Bid Protest. He described how the Protest had cost us time and money, and he laid out our scaled-back plan.

  Chip wrote that we would “blow our budget and lose our investors” under the Bid Laws, but that the Attorney General “has given us a clear set of guideposts for getting us treated as the private enterprise” that we were. “This is where you come in,” he said, inviting the political action that might provide cover for the mayor. “We are requesting a revised license agreement that costs the city nothing.”

  A few hours later, Chip and I received Ruberto’s response—in an angry three-way phone call.

  “You’ve just lost me as your biggest supporter,” he said, extremely irate. “And now I am not going to change that agreement.”

  Finally, the mayor had a reason: He could blame us.

  The response of some other recipients wasn’t much better. The day after the mayor blew up at us, Chip was in Pittsfield at a Dave Southard fund raiser to present our check from the September 4th game, as promised.

  In spite of the fact that Chip had given up his Saturday morning—and had made some very gracious remarks in behalf of Southard and the Parks Commission—he got a noticeable cold shoulder from Mike Filpi, the commissioner who had said, “You can call me any time and things will get done.”

  Unless you happen to believe in transparency.

  The reactions of Filpi and Ruberto to Chip’s email did not make sense. Nor did the ensuing silence of most of the commissioners and city councilors. So, what was going on here?

  The clock was now ticking loudly.

  CHAPTER 23

  “What is the matter with you people?”

  FALL 2004

  September 14: Chip and I met at Wahconah Park with Tim Craw, who brought a guy named John Kelly, organizer for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 7 AFL-CIO.

  The more the merrier.

  Kelly, who looks to be in his mid-thirties, is a tall guy with brown hair and a mouth that turns down at the corners when he speaks. In spite of his height, there is a certain softness about him, as if he’s never actually soldered a fixture. He and Craw made a good pair—the prince and the frog.