Foul Ball
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Host to organized baseball since 1892, Pittsfield, Massachusetts’s Wahconah Park was soon to be abandoned by the owner of the Pittsfield Mets, who would move his team to a new stadium in another town—an all too familiar story. Enter former Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton and his partner with the best deal ever offered to a community: a locally owned professional baseball team and a privately restored city-owned ballpark at no cost to the taxpayers.
The only people who didn’t like Bouton's plan were the mayor, the mayor's hand-picked Parks Commissioners, a majority of the City Council, the only daily newspaper, the city’s largest bank, its most powerful law firm, and a guy from General Electric. Everyone else—or approximately 98% of the citizens of Pittsfield—loved it. But the “good old boys” hated Bouton’s plan because it would put a stake in the heart of a proposed $18.5 million baseball stadium—a new stadium that the citizens of Pittsfield had voted against three different times. In this riveting account, Bouton unmasks a mayor who brags that “the fix is in,” a newspaper that lies to its readers, and a government that operates out of a bar.
But maybe the most incredible story is what happened after Foul Ball was published—a story in itself. Invited back by a new mayor, Bouton and his partner raise $1.2 million, help discover a document dating Pittsfield’s baseball origins to 1791, and stage a vintage game that’s broadcast live by ESPN-TV.
Who could have guessed what would happen next? And that this time it would involve the Massachusetts Attorney General?
“An irresistible story whose outcome remains in doubt until the very end. Not just a funny book, but a patriotic one.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Bouton proves that a badly run city government can be just as dangerous—and just as hilarious—as a badly run baseball team.”—Keith Olbermann
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Jim Bouton was born in Newark, NJ, in 1939. He grew up in Rochelle Park, a blue-collar town that was too small for Little League. The result was that kids learned to play baseball without uniforms, parents, coaches, or umpires.
In high school, his nickname was "warm up Bouton" because he never got into the games. Advised that becoming a major league pitcher was "unrealistic," Bouton wrote his Careers Week report on the life of a forest ranger. He got a C on his report and an A on the cover--a nice drawing of a squirrel in a tree.
Bouton was an All-Star pitcher and won 20 games for the Yankees in 1963. The next year he won 18 games and beat the Cardinals twice in the World Series. Eventually a sore arm got him sold to the Seattle Pilots--for a bag of batting practice balls. That's when he began taking notes for his diary Ball Four, published in 1970.
In the 1970s he was a top-rated TV sportscaster in New York City, acted in a Robert Altman film called The Long Goodbye, and made a brief comeback with the Atlanta Braves.
In 2003 Bouton wrote and self-published Foul Ball, a diary of his battle to save a historic ballpark in Pittsfied, MA. Bouton says he only writes when he's bursting to say something. "Ball Four was a book I wanted to write," he says. "Foul Ball was a book I had to write.
Today Bouton lives in a forest in western Massachusetts.
