This was reviewed in this month's Harpers. Sounds great.
http://www.jimbouton.com/wahconah_book.html#kipen<edit>
In a back story sure to ring a bell with San Franciscans, Pittsfield city fathers had swung and missed at the ballot box three times in a row, increasingly desperate to get voters to approve the spending of taxpayer money on an antiseptic new ballpark. Enter Bouton and his neighbor, who come up with a plan to save Wahconah -- at 111 years old, the longest-surviving minor-league park in America -- and make prospective teams bid against one another for the right to play there. This would have marked a momentous reversal in the way professional sports usually works, with franchises blackmailing cities into bidding for them.
Because one of the advantages of publishing your own book is getting to write your own flap copy, Bouton himself explains there what happened to the plan in his own pesky, commonsensical style: "The only people who didn't like it were the Mayor, the Mayor's hand-picked Parks Commissioners, a majority of the City Council, the only daily newspaper in town, the city's largest bank, its most powerful law firm, and a guy from General Electric. Everyone else -- or approximately 94% of the citizens of Pittsfield, Massachusetts -- loved it."
Bouton can cite the percentage of his majority because, in a scene of genuinely agonizing suspense, he submits the issue to a telephone referendum during a locally televised debate. It's just one twist among many in an irresistible story whose outcome remains in doubt until the very end -- and maybe even to this day.
Through it all, Bouton loses neither his sense of outrage nor his sense of humor. There's a priceless moment when Bouton describes a Seattle Pilots Web site as "so comprehensive you can hear the hot water not running in the clubhouse."
It gets even better when one of his fatuous millionaire opponents rises to state his piece before the townsfolk. To wit: "I'm not about fighting, okay? I'm about the community and the charity and making things work. Okay?" As Bouton's long-suffering wife, Paula, later characterizes his opponent, "He's a nice-looking man with a beautiful speaking voice . . . and then he spoils it all by speaking."
Paula gradually emerges as the sly, skeptical soul of "Foul Ball." Bouton's diary of their loving marriage, as it coasts the shoals of late middle age, is one of the book's real joys.
more...
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0970911718/qid=1079395116/sr=8-1/ref=pd_ka_1/104-6538175-0243155?v=glance&s=books&n=507846From Publishers WeeklyThis former Yankee pitcher, who wrote the sports tell-all template Ball Four, has a self-conscious voice that almost stifles this compelling story of Pittsfield, Mass., residents resisting a new stadium in order to renovate historic Wahconah Park instead. Bouton fancies himself both "pariah" and U.S. marshal, and writes one public official, "we have always tried to be respectful.... Go take a shower." But he accomplishes his goal of making the oldest minor league ballpark in America a metaphor for business interests run amok whatever the costs politically, environmentally and, yes, financially...
From BooklistBouton has been raising hell with the baseball establishment since 1970, when his landmark Ball Four revealed the frat-party side of the grand old game. Now he lines up against the economic lynchpin of pro sports: publicly funded stadiums. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, is the site of venerable Wahconah Park, home to various minor-league teams since 1892. Bouton and most of the area's citizenry feel the stadium should be repaired, updated, and preserved. The city government, however, along with various business interests, wants to build a new $18 million stadium--at taxpayer expense. This relatively small skirmish is portrayed by Bouton as a microcosm of the publicly funded sports facility battles that have been fought around the country. Typically, taxpayers foot the bill--under the pressure of team abandonment--so owners and players can get rich. Bouton, humor intact and sense of irony sharpened, chronicles the battle between the forces of fiscal responsibility and those who would build the new stadium (on a toxic waste dump). The good guys win this time, as the old ballpark is saved, at least temporarily, but Bouton paints a distinctly disturbing picture of corporate greed and taxpayer exploitation. Interestingly, Bouton's original publisher pulled out under pressure from pro-stadium business interests, leaving the author to publish his expose himself.
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