Fair Ball, and a Denver Boot - Bibblings| David Scribner's journal for thought, ideas, commentary, images, fiction observed and imagined

Fair Ball, and a Denver Boot

by David Scribner

A few weeks ago, my town and baseball got divorced. It's final, or appears to be, and it's a shame, really. They ended the way they started, bitterly, feuding over custody and visitation rights. It was a nasty breakup - a very public scandal that the media feasted on for weeks and weeks. They'd always had a rocky relationship - periodically blowing up and charging each other with neglect. We had all gotten used to it. That's the way they are, we said, they'll patch it up - some couples are just meant to fight. And after so long a courtship and cohabitation you'd think they'd have figured out how to get along.

Two hundred years ago, they were childhood sweethearts, a match made in a field of dreams. The very first mention in print of the game of baseball turns out to have been in an ordinance adopted by my town. On the town square - the same one that became an oval later on - the boys were playing ball and, though it wasn't mentioned specifically in the record, it's likely that a few foul balls came perilously close to busting out windows in Town Hall - or maybe it was an eighteenth-century Barry Bonds cranking them off the courthouse wall in left or the bank façade in right. Whatever, City Councilors tallied up potential injury to public and private property and declared the game wasn't worth it. They banned the playing of baseball in the center of town. Looking back, this incident was an omen of things to come. Baseball never had a chance so long as politics and big business were involved.

It was an off and on affair after that. The first intercollegiate game of baseball, between Amherst and Williams colleges, was played in 1859 on a diamond that's now the downtown corner of Maplewood and North streets. At this moment, I'm sitting in a coffee house whose floor-to-ceiling window overlooks the stone marker commemorating the three-and-one-half hour contest that Amherst took 73-32. A yellow fireplug is next to the stone, and a black iron bench. The button for a slumping pedestrian signal points to the spot. Where the pitcher's mound might have been is a wire sculpture of a three-headed jackal snarling at air. A plaque announces its name as -Leader of the Pack- and its sponsor as the Pittsfield Garden Tour Committee. Its feral anger could be taken as the perfect expression of what ultimately happened between baseball and my town.

My town and baseball got hitched around 1920 - about the time the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth, come to think of it, two fateful events in the history of the national pastime. The newlyweds lived at Wahconah Park, a 40-acre playground described by observers at the time as a swamp. Though it provided a diamond - that was it - the town really wasn't all that committed to marriage. The land was acquired on the cheap. It faced west into the sun and was in the floodplain next to the cemetery. Whenever it rained, ducks and geese splashed in the infield and parking lot. But baseball was in love. It didn't complain.

Some said the town had someone else on the side - that was the rumor going around - because the town was obviously avoiding chores at home. Wahconah Park was described in the press as -a dirty hole- and trashed as -the city's most expensive playground- that was actually a menace to the neighborhood because of flooding. The partnership was on the rocks, even then, but Pittsfield Professional Baseball still paid $500 a year for the use of the facility.

Finally, enough was enough. Baseball got sick and tired of the town's indifference. To save the relationship the town built a grandstand and did some other improvements - and it took years to get it completed. It wasn't much, a small grandstand and bleachers, but it had a grass infield and dugouts. That was a big deal. Players didn't have to sit in the sun - or put their gloves underneath a bench when it rained. It was enough - just enough, even though the drainage didn't get fixed. Major league teams used Wahconah Park for their farm teams, and over the years some famous players squinted into the setting sun in Pittsfield. Dick Lasner, a brilliant photographer from Maryland and a summer resident of Stockbridge Bowl, created the evocative image reproduced here - this is just a detail - of a Double AA game when Pittsfield hosted a Chicago Cubs farm team back in the '80s.

But it was not to last. After a decade of broken promises from mayor after mayor, from City Council after City Council, to repair the rundown park, fix drainage and renovate the sewage-coated restrooms and locker rooms, or build another park, prompted a pledge by the town's Minor League franchise to threaten to take its team elsewhere. While the city dillied, a new park was being built across the border in New York State.

Then baseball made a crucial, desperate mistake, and sealed the fate of the partnership: It had an affair with big business. And not just any business but an out-of-town media conglomerate. In order to preserve professional baseball's presence in Western Massachusetts, the local newspaper, owned by a Denver media magnate, put together a consortium of banks and businesses to build a new stadium in the center of town. The magnate put up the dough for to purchase property adjacent to the paper - it wasn't entirely philanthropic, of course, no magnate deals are. The paper would have been relieved of substantial tax burden by donating some rundown buildings to the project.

The proposed stadium was an overblown affair, too large for the site so that houses and small businesses would have had to be removed, and its grandiose design and exaggerated claims to revive a down-in-the-mouth downtown, were more a tribute to the bigwig sponsors and their minions than to the actual reality and needs of the city. It was like a poor boy from the wrong side of the tracks falling in love with a rich socialite. And the consortium thought they had it all wrapped up; it was flashing baseball all over town, in fancy clothes. They'd concocted a private/public partnership to raise money and secure a team franchise; they'd schmoozed up the business community with visions of a revitalized city; and they'd concocted an entity, ironically called a -Civic- Authority, that avoided having to use expensive labor contracts. They were so confident that one principal was heard to say that the taking of a few houses in back of the newspaper for the stadium wouldn't pose any problem. -Why, who would want to live there?- he boasted. And they paid a reported $30,000 for a poll showing the project had public support. It didn't. When given the opportunity, city residents voted the stadium down - they judged this was not a good match. Baseball had to drag itself back to its former digs, forlorn and rejected.

Then the town flirted with a baseball celebrity, an ex-Yankee pitcher named Jim Bouton. He had a real affection for old-time, traditional baseball, and Wahconah Park in particular, shabby as it was. He thought big business had corrupted the soul of America's pastime. He and two partners had big plans for the old field, and they proposed to the town, envisioning a kind of theme park complex in tribute to traditional baseball. Their plans may have been unsupportable and unrealistic, but they never had an opportunity to be tested. It was too soon. The city was still in therapy over the broken dream of a new stadium. At first, the city seemed smitten. The mayor declared his support. Last summer, a couple of old-time baseball games were played, complete with historic uniforms, equipment and rules. But when it came to the prenuptials, the town had second thoughts. Public servants whined that the Bouton crew would have to abide by union contracts in any work to restore the Wahconah facility. And suddenly the mayor lost his enthusiasm, refusing to find a compromise in the language of the agreement. On that issue, the Bouton trio pulled out. The town had blown it. The corporate potentates who had favored the previous stadium idea sniggered behind the scenes. They relished the instant replay of the soap opera. And they smiled knowingly when the town declined the ex-Yankee's game plan on the very grounds they had proposed.

The marriage between baseball and my town is over. There will be neither happiness nor baseball in my town's Mudville next summer, unless a new suitor arrives soon. Perhaps Dan Duquette, former Red Sox GM who runs a baseball camp in the hills, might step in, but whoever it is will no doubt be very cautious, given Pittsfield's fickleness. But not everyone came out badly. The Denver magnate was able to recoup his investment - and then some - by selling the property to a developer. A full-service, drive-in CVS drug store occupies the site now. It's doing well. It's the national pastime.

From the Department of Clarifications: A communiqué from -TickerTrader- chastised me for inflating the size of the loans WAVE executives awarded themselves - -less than a million, not 'multi-million' - - TT reports, though he (or she) doesn't endorse the practices by a company whose capers in luring investors while failing to show any profits inspired a play presented to a Harvard Business School audience. TT also notes that WAVE is on the NASDAQ exchange, not the NYSE. The complete letter is published on Scribbyworld's -Customer Service- page.

From the Department of Breaking News: In February, the British film duo known as the Heather Brothers will be occupying the historic Allen House across from Pittsfield [Mass.] High School to produce -The Cage,- a horror film -with a twist,- I'm told. They've come to the right place.

From the Travel Agency: Pittsfield native Brooke Ruiz, the dry cleaning employee whose yearning to find fame and fortune - and just enough money to buy a house and go to college - at the gaming tables in Las Vegas I reported a few weeks ago, has landed a job at Binion's Horseshoe casino on Freemont Street in Vegas.

-It's so cool,- she exclaimed as I picked up my cleaning on her last day behind the counter. -The Binion is the first one you see on The Strip and it's where they hold the World Poker Tour. Everything's going my way. This has never happened before.-

Long overdue kudos and thanks to my friend and colleague Marc Weiner, the talented, brilliant Webmeister who designed the Scribbyworld Web site and provided a down-and-out ex-editor a forum for these scribblings. Find Marc at MarcWeiner.com

In coming weeks: -The Painted Box- and -Water Wars,- fables for our time, plus news you won't find in the newspaper. Send your queries and comments to bibblings@scribbyworld.com, or stop by Digital Blend, 76 North St., Pittsfield, Mass. For more irreverence, go to www.bimbopolitics.com, where Juliane Glantz, Jacuzzi, Ben, Peaches, and friends hold court.

2/19/2010
Is there still an actual "Pittsfield Professional Baseball Corporation"? My dad has a share of capital stock issued August 12, 1941.
Ralph Kenyon

69.205.48.96