Foul Ball

by Jim Bouton

  Fleisig might actually return in 2003, since he has a two-year contract. And what a contract it is, negotiated as it was with his pal, Mayor Doyle. The agreement, which redefines the term “sweetheart deal,” even for Pittsfield, contains the same kind of giveaways that are the hallmark of city dealings. Herewith a few items, including my favorite, number four:

  1. A piddling $50,000 performance bond that Fleisig gets back as soon as he spends the first $50,000 of the $150,000 promised in his proposal, for improvements, over two years.

  2. No timely notice provisions. Once Fleisig has spent his $50,000, he can walk away at any time, without penalty, leaving the city at his mercy on renewals or replacements.

  3. Fleisig is responsible only for “nonstructural repairs,” and only during the baseball season. If the lights fail or an ejector pump blows, the city is on the hook.

  4. All concession operations, year round, for all events, including high school sports, are controlled by Fleisig.

  The signing of Fleisig’s contract was trumpeted with much fanfare by the Berkshire Eagle, without apparent embarrassment. In fact, the Eagle went so far as to quote Fleisig calling Mayor Doyle a “tough negotiator.” Good thing, or Fleisig might have owned the ballpark.

  A month after the Fleisig deal was announced, in a development the Eagle called “ironic,” Curt Preisser was named assistant general manager of Fleisig’s Black Bears.

  Naturally, the Eagle never questioned these goings on. They were too busy beating the new-stadium drums.

  “I don’t know why they’re still doing that,” said Chip, “when they know the money’s not there.”

  “Ever-Scrib is a sick man,” I said.

  Here are the presenting symptoms, which appeared as headlines or items over the last six months:

  REVIVE DOWNTOWN STADIUM PLAN

  DOWNTOWN STADIUM REMAINS A MUST

  A new stadium is necessary for a region so heavily reliant on tourism….

  CITY NEEDS STADIUM, AFFILIATED BASEBALL

  [A] new stadium the Berkshires so desperately needs…

  CITY DESPERATELY NEEDS NEW STADIUM

  Ever-Scrib was even desperate about what the new owners of the Boston Red Sox might do with Fenway Park, clear across the state:

  The prospective new owners appear determined to renovate Fenway Park, a crumbling structure desperately in need of replacement.

  Tomorrow on Oprah: “People who desperately need new stadiums and the people who love them.”

  CHAPTER 16

  “Weapons of mass distortion”

  FALL 2002

  The question Chip and I are still asked, almost daily it seems, is, Are we still interested in Wahconah Park? That’s hard to answer. On the one hand, we still have a vision of how things could be and we have all these new friends in Pittsfield we’d love to work with. On the other hand, even though most of our political opponents are now out of office—temporarily anyway—we’d still have the power structure against us.

  The sad fact is that in Pittsfield, it doesn’t really matter who holds office at any given time. The shots are called by Berkshire Bank, the Eagle, Cain Hibbard, and General Electric. Whether it’s a plan to restore Wahconah Park or a campaign to clean up the Housatonic River, if the Gang of Four doesn’t want it, it’s not going to happen. No matter what the people want.

  And no matter whom they elect.

  Sara Hathaway was essentially elected mayor by the Wahconah Yes! voters, who would have gone for Dave Potts if they thought he had a chance. Yet it took Hathaway nine months to appoint new park commissioners, one of whom sat in limbo for six additional months, waiting for one commissioner to finally take a hike—you win a case of George Scott bobble-head dolls if you guessed it was Cliff Nilan. Why was he still sitting there? “Political reasons,” said Joe Guzzo. “He’s part of the old-boy network.”

  Others have alluded to the Bossidy money, the $1 million check that arrived in a letter from Bossidy, directing that the money be spent in a way that “Cliff Nilan deems appropriate.” The theory there was that Nilan was being kept on as a courtesy to Bossidy.

  Not everyone is so courteous. A caller to the Dan Valenti Show had his own take on Bossidy’s $1 million. “Any money Bossidy gives,” said the caller, “is coming out of his $120 million in stock options he got for being second in command at GE when they dumped PCBs on our precious city, and second in command when they laid off thousands of workers.”

  But the possibility of our return to Pittsfield has nothing to do with Sara Hathaway or Cliff Nilan or even Larry Bossidy. There are other forces that need to be dealt with, starting with the Northern League, which currently controls Pittsfield’s baseball future.

  After the Fleisig contract was signed, Dave Potts and Gene Nadeau, before Nadeau was made a park commissioner, met with Fleisig to see if they could improve the agreement for Pittsfield.

  “That contract is a joke and you know it,” said Potts. “It’s a sweetheart deal.”

  “I’m not going to give you something if you won’t give me something,” said Fleisig. “What are you going to give me?”

  “What do you want?” asked Nadeau.

  “Hypothetically,” said Fleisig, “I want to be sure that Bouton and Elitzer are out of the picture, as far as Wahconah Park is concerned, forever.”

  Then there are the petty officials—both current and former—like Hickey and Massery and Dowd and Lee and Grunin and Kerwood, and even ex-mayor Doyle who, reports say, goes around town telling people he still runs things. Guys who, according to Arlos, hate us simply because they hate our supporters. Like Afghan warlords, they’d rather rule over rubble than share power in paradise.

  Behind them all is the Gang of Four—the ones the others have to call to find out what they should think. These are the real obstacles to progress in Pittsfield. Chip and I and Eric Margenau have decided that for us to come back there would have to be nothing short of a regime change.

  “We’re not coming back to do battle,” said Chip. “Everyone’s going to have to want us.”

  “That may not be possible with the Eagle—and its weapons of mass distortion,” I said. “What about Cain Hibbard?”

  “Disband the partnership,” said Chip.

  “That’s a good idea,” I said. “What about Berkshire Bank?”

  “Let them get behind building the Civic Center or indoor arena that we initially proposed,” said Chip. “It would be good for the community and show a change of heart. They could invite us to bring in a hockey team.”

  Of course, an indoor arena leads back to the Eagle property, and the last member of the Gang of Four, General Electric. While there’s no direct evidence that GE tried to undermine our plan for Wahconah Park, or that it backed a new stadium to hide a PCB dump site, it’s hard not to wonder.

  General Electric is the ghost that still haunts Pittsfield. A ghost that walks the streets, carefully watching, keeping the lid on anything that might bubble up, waiting for the last of the witnesses to die. And in spite of what it has done to the community, it walks around in plain view.

  This is still “a GE town,” as Dan Bianchi said. It’s the home of their worldwide plastics division, which employs about five hundred people. Former GE executives run important institutions like the Greylock Federal Credit Union. The board of PEDA (the Pittsfield Economic Development Authority, charged with attracting business to the abandoned, fifty-two acre GE site) has been dominated by former GE executives. Its director Tom Hickey, a GE executive for twenty-three years, is said to be threatening a run for mayor.

  “GE has been skilled at involving themselves in the community,” said Tim Gray, “so they can keep control.”

  Control is very important when you are sitting on a toxic time-bomb, with a questionable “settlement,” a cleanup of the rest of the Housatonic scheduled for review in 2005, and all of it played out against GE’s continual challenges to the EPA order to clean up the nearby Hudson. If you can’t control your own hometown, w
hat happens with the rest of the country, not to mention your stock price?

  Part of how GE keeps control is spelled out in its own Housatonic River Public Affairs Plan. This is an internal document that Gray said he “found on my doorstep one morning.” What it shows, among other things, is how GE keeps tabs on people. “Anyone who is involved in PCBs,” said Gray. “Like letter-to-the-editor writers.”

  GE has lists.

  And they have the Eagle.

  In Berkshire County, it’s important to at least appear as if you care about the environment. But even when the Eagle makes a gesture in that direction, it misleads. A recent Ever-Scrib editorial:

  All across the nation… oil and solvents from long-abandoned factories are… dribbling into the rivers…. On the east side of Pittsfield, where for 70-odd years General Electric made its transformers, filled with a PCB-laden oil…. The stuff got everywhere—into the soil, the ground water, the river, people’s vegetable gardens.

  The key phrases are “dribbling into the rivers” and “the stuff got everywhere,” as if the PCBs accidentally leaked out of control. But a much different scenario is described by Vinnie Curro, whose Ravin Auto Body sat next to the abandoned GE buildings on Newell Street. Referring to the tanks of chemical waste that backed up to the Housatonic, Curro said, “The GE bosses would tell their workers to open a valve and take a two-hour lunch.”

  Based on my experience with Ever-Scrib, I believe Curro.

  I also believe Ed Bates.

  In 1983, a GE commissioned Stewart Report stated that 40,000 pounds of PCBs had been dumped into the Housatonic River. But Ed Bates, chief of transformers for GE, said his division alone could account for at least two million pounds.

  And I believe Tim Gray, now a visiting professor at Harvard.

  “People would say, ‘Tim, you can’t fight GE,’” said Gray. “GE employees were always coming to me, ‘Tim, take this, I can’t do it, GE will stop my pension.’ GE told their employees, ‘Shut up, you’re going to lose your jobs.’ Vinnie Curro was dragged through the mud by GE. He had to become an environmentalist.”

  According to Curro, GE has friends in government.

  “I was threatened, you name it,” he told me. “I’ve been checked by every state agency you can imagine. The funniest was the federal. My accountant said [to the investigator they sent], ‘Come in the office, would you like a cup of coffee?’ I told the guy I’ve been targeted before. After fifteen minutes checking the books he said, ‘This is bullshit, I shouldn’t even be here. I got other places to go. What’s the way to the Mass Pike?’”

  GE has the politicians.

  “The city told businesses, ‘Stay calm, we’ll help you,’” said Gray. “Then the statute of limitations ran out.”

  And the Chamber of Commerce.

  “When the Newell Street property owners came forward to sue GE,” said Gray, “the Chamber of Commerce treated them like pariahs. And the banks wouldn’t lend them money.”

  Speaking of banks, the latest news comes from Berkshire Bank, where Mike Daly was just elected president and CEO. And Larry Bossidy was named “nonexecutive” chairman of the board. I’m not sure what nonexecutive means, but it can’t be good for Wahconah Park. In any case, it looks like Daly will be having more of those meetings with Larry Bossidy just sitting there.

  Most ominous of all was Daly’s quote in the newspaper, saying that Bossidy would be of great value because “he has good ideas about how to deal with the sharks.” This is like saying Godzilla has good ideas about how to deal with the monsters.

  What sharks is Daly talking about? Dave Potts, the open-mike fiend? Anne Leaf, the seventy-year-old fax-machine ogre? Gene Nadeau, who can’t wait to undermine the bank from his new position as a park commissioner? Any poor devil who might just be thinking about poking his head up to ask a few questions?

  Or are Chip and I the sharks? And what “good ideas” might Bossidy have in mind for us?

  At least we don’t have to earn a living in Pittsfield.

  Fear of not getting a job, or losing the one you have, is the major instrument of control in high-unemployment cities. It’s why people like Jonathan Levine and Dan Valenti are circumspect about how they’ve been treated. It’s why Rick Jones spoke warily about a plumbing inspector’s call to his boss. Why GE workers made anonymous calls and why documents are dropped on a doorstep. Folks are afraid of being held “accountable,” as Mayor Doyle once put it.

  The tragedy in Pittsfield is that the citizens, in order to survive, must rely on the very same people who’ve harmed them. The best paying jobs are doled out by those in power, leaving the citizens no choice but to help keep the lid on their own grievances.

  It’s been a strange journey for Chip and me. We started out on a country road and ended up in a back alley—a back alley that’s polluted in more ways than one. And our plan for Wahconah Park is the least of the casualties. We’re like the old Bowery Boys, who try to help a poor widow recover some lost bonds and discover a dead body in the trunk of a car.

  And the story isn’t over yet.

  CHAPTER 17

  “The sub-plot about pollution has to be cut”

  In June of 2002, you may have seen a news item about this book: “PublicAffairs to publish new book by Jim Bouton… in time for 2003 baseball season.” Editor Paul Golob was quoted as saying, “Jim is fearless in opening doors that are closed to others.”

  I don’t know about fearless. Unconscious is more like it.

  Submitting the chapters of Foul Ball as I wrote them, I got positive feedback from Golob. “I am enjoying the book very much,” he emailed me, “and laughing out loud occasionally—a very good sign.” Another good sign was that Golob and I agreed on the editing. The only thing we differed on was how much to cut Fleisig’s presentation to the Parks Commission. I wanted to keep all sixteen pages, Golob wanted just one, and we compromised at five.

  By October, PublicAffairs was pretty hyped up about the book. This would be their big book of the spring, I was told. Catalog copy was written, I had just recorded a promotional audio tape, dinner was planned with the top buyers at Barnes & Noble, and publicity director Gene Taft and I had mapped out a sixteen-city book tour. “Everyone continues to be very excited about your book,” Golob wrote, in one of his many effusive emails.

  Then, on October 30th, I had lunch with Golob and Peter Osnos, who owns PublicAffairs. Osnos is a sharp-featured man in his late fifties, who favors striped shirts with contrasting white spread collars and cuffs. After a brief discussion about marketing, Osnos talked about the need to document everything in the book, especially what I was saying about GE. “The most important thing in the world to General Electric is how they are perceived as a company,” he said. “Any negative references to General Electric have to be balanced by a response from a GE spokesperson.”

  What the hell was this?

  “I never asked for a response from the baseball commissioner when I wrote Ball Four,” I said, annoyed. I couldn’t understand Osnos’s focus on General Electric, which took up fewer than ten pages of the book. Then it was made a little clearer to me.

  “The top lawyer for General Electric happens to be a good friend of mine,” said Osnos, as if commenting on the weather. “And he’s about to become an investor in PublicAffairs.”

  What are the odds?

  And what should I do? The book was almost ready, a catalogue would soon be printed, names of potential blurb writers were being bandied about. If I jumped ship, how long would it take me to find another publisher? The book could be delayed by months, maybe a year. I wanted to believe the GE thing was just a coincidence.

  But I needed to be reassured. A week later I met with Osnos and Golob again. This time I brought Paula, my agent Matt Bialer, and Chip (my partner in all things Wahconah). Osnos, who knew why we were there, walked in shouting angrily. “I don’t want any part of this,” he roared, jabbing his finger in front of my face. “You’re questioning my integrity.” At one po
int, he turned and pointed to pictures of I. F. Stone, Ben Bradlee, and Bob Bernstein, behind him on the wall. “See those pictures? That’s my guide, right there.”

  For twenty minutes Osnos refused to let anyone speak. “And how did you know that Ben Heineman was going to be an investor in PublicAffairs?” he hollered. I told him I hadn’t known the lawyer’s name until he just said it. “Well, let me tell you something,” Osnos continued at the same decibel level. “My friendship with Ben Heineman is more important to me than any book. And Ben Heineman’s name WILL NOT GO IN THAT BOOK!”

  Let the record show that I never mentioned his name.

  After Osnos finally left the room, Golob tried to smooth things over. He talked about the need to back up what I was saying about GE, but he also had some suggestions. “There are ways of rephrasing things so they don’t cause legal problems,” he said. “And don’t worry about Peter. We’re going to publish the hell out of this book.” Then Golob proceeded to show us some cover designs that the art department had been working on.

  In the car on the way back to Massachusetts, Paula and Chip and I tried to figure out what the hell to do. “I’ve lost that friendly, comfortable feeling about PublicAffairs,” said Paula. “But maybe we should stay and try to work things out with them.” Chip said, “But if you stay, it might call into question the integrity of the book.” And I remembered something Chip had said earlier this summer. Speaking of the James Bond movies, he had said, “The hero would never catch the bad guys if they didn’t overreact.”

  In any case, the decision to go or stay was made for me a few days later. A letter from Golob said, “The subplot about pollution has to be cut, completely,” and references to General Electric must be “limited to background” only. “This is strictly an editorial matter,” Golob wrote, “and not a business question.” It had absolutely nothing to do with GE’s top lawyer becoming a partner in PublicAffairs.