JULY 2022 - AudioFile
The engaging snarkiness of Jim Bouton’s writing shines in this entertaining audiobook. Bouton chronicles his efforts to save Wahconah Park, an old stadium in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and to bring a minor league baseball team to the city. Jim Seybert narrates with the right mix of candor, hubris, and resentment. This is not a baseball book, as many would expect. Instead, it’s a chronicle of the dysfunction and political gamesmanship Bouton faced during his ultimately unsuccessful efforts. Seybert builds on the dialogue that makes the story so engaging, taking it to the next level with sarcastic inflections that enhance the details of Bouton’s frustrated efforts. Even non-baseball fans will relish this performance. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
The Capital Times
"Erin Brokovich meets Fields of Dreams."
David Kipen
"An irresistible story whose outcome remains in doubt until the very end. Not
just a funny book, but a patriotic one."
—San Francisco Chronicle
John Feinstein
"Now in his fifth decade of telling the truth no matter the consequences, Bouton proves that a badly-run city government can be just as dangerous---and just as hilarious---as a badly-run baseball team."
"What it shares with Ball Four is Bouton's humor, his sense of what's right and wrong, and a remarkable tale that---if you didn't trust the author---you would find difficult to believe."
—AOL Sports
Publishers Weekly
This 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. When he points to former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani's nearly successful (yet minority-view) efforts to build new stadiums for the Mets and the Yankees despite a multibillion-dollar budget gap, Bouton is persuasive. But when Bouton declares his own motives are to "save an old ballpark, make some money, have fun," he is less so because he seems to delight in all the chicanery. Still, his commitment is beyond question; the book includes not only news accounts and e-mails, but even instant-messaging exchanges. At 354 pages,it's exhausting, but also heartfelt. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Bouton pitched for the New York Yankees in the 1960s, when such legends as Mickey Mantle starred for the team. His real claim to fame, though, was his tell-all diary, Foul Ball, which became an instant classic-and, to the baseball establishment, made him a permanent pariah. With this new diary, he again bucks authority by questioning America's need for publicly financed stadiums. He regards this feverish trend as a scam that the well-heeled perpetuate at the expense of the struggling tax payer and common fan. Bouton illustrates his argument by focusing on his hometown, Pittsfield, MA, where a highly rated stadium called Wahconah Park still fills a serviceable role. Wahconah Park is so old that the great Lou Gehrig played here some 80 years ago. The fans love it, but the city fathers and big business want to tear it down and replace it. Bouton here details the struggle to preserve this landmark. His self-published offering is a cautionary tale for us all. Recommended for most collections.-Paul Kaplan, Lake Villa Dist. Lib., IL Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Populist maverick, pariah of professional baseball bigwigs, Bouton (Strike Zone, 1994, etc.) tells of his efforts to preserve-and a coven of movers-and-shakers and good-old-boys to abandon-a historic baseball park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. When it comes to baseball parks, writes Bouton, " 'If we build it, they will come' has evolved into 'If we don't build it, they will go,' " referring to the rash of new, economically dubious stadiums. Pittsfield's Wahconah Park, built in 1892, one of the oldest in the US, was about to become another of these statistics, until Bouton and his comrade-in-arms Chip Elitzer decided to offer an alternative to the $18.5-million, pork-barrel proposal for a new stadium: "We'll spend private dollars to renovate an existing ballpark for a locally owned team." Bouton-as zealous to entertain his readers with tangy one-liners as he is in uncovering the myriad corruption, deals, and fixes that attended the drive for a new stadium-adroitly manages a number of stories at once. There's the backroom power-brokering, ego-strutting, and just plain greed of making taxpayers foot the bill for a stadium they have time-and-again voted down in referendums; the historic importance of old ballparks, with their quirks and intimacy and evocation of the game's past; and an environmental subplot: the land being touted for the new stadium may be a toxic dump. Capping it with a ballpark would put paid to the millions of dollars it would cost to clean it up. (Bouton points fingers, too, at other infamous polluters-General Electric, for instance. After a GE lawyer was set to invest in PublicAffairs, Bouton's intended and enthusiastic publisher, PublicAffairs suddenly requested thatthe GE material be excised. Bouton smelled a rat-et voilà: a self-published work.) A good, if at times windy, story. Even if his proposal got smothered by the small-city political weight, he got the voice of Pittsfield's regular folk heard and the ballpark saved, for now.
