Say this for Jim Bouton: he knows a good story when he stumbles upon one. More than thirty years after Ball Four, Bouton returned to bookshelves last year with the acclaimed Foul Ball: My Life and Hard Times Trying to Save an Old Ballpark, a diary of his battle to spruce up Pittsfield, Massachussetts’ Wahconah Park and lure a minor-league ballclub to play there. I covered the much-acclaimed book in depth last July.

Bouton’s ownership group was unsuccessful in securing a team, but his intrepid work did uncover a huge scandal: the land which town paper (and Bouton detractor) The Berkshire Eagle was trying to donate to build Wahconah’s replacement was contaminated by carcinogenic PCBs. Meanwhile, rival owner Jonathan Fleisig, who beat out the Bouton group, did to Pittsfield exactly what the old knuckleballer predicted: he left the town high and dry. After his two-year lease of Waconah expired, Fleisig pulled up stakes and moved his Northeast League franchise, the Berkshire Black Bears, to New Haven, once again leaving the Massachusetts town without a team.

Like clockwork, Bouton has re-emerged on behalf of Pittsfield. ESPN’s Jim Caple reports that the Bulldog plans to restore the ballpark and purchase a team by raising $4 million through a limited public stock offering. According to the article, $2.5 million is for renovation, $1.5 million for the franchise and operating costs, and the offering is limited to 400 investors (more information is available at Wahconahpark@aol.com). This short article from Capital News 9 says that the offering amounts to 55 percent of the group’s stock, with Bouton and his partners, Chip Elitzer and Eric Margenau, holding the other 45 percent.

Caple’s article notes the impact Bouton’s well-chronicled plight had on the town:

After its publication, the city elected a new mayor, James Ruberto, who asked Bouton and Elitzer if they would be interested in reviving their ballpark plan.

In other words, they beat city hall.

“I never imagined this. It was the furthest thing from our minds,” Bouton says. “It’s being called the book that changed the city. But it’s all about Wahconah Park. It was clear the park was the emotional center of the town. The citizens may not have been able to understand the budget problems with the hospital and the police, but they could understand the park. They voted down three plans to replace the ballpark.

“We came up with the idea to turn the whole system upside down. Instead of being at the mercy of an itinerate team and its owner, we said we’ll make an investment in the park and get our own team. Usually, it’s the team that holds the city hostage, but we’ve turned that around. This is going to be a privately-restored ballpark with a publicly-owned team.”

Despite Caple’s piece, it’s tough to tell how seriously to take all of this. The Bulldog’s own website has several links and excerpts of articles concerning the Bouton group and Wahconah, most of them coming from the Eagle and none more recent than March 17. The newspaper clearly still carries a grudge:

The bottom of the barrel baseball played by the Berkshire Black Bears was rejected by knowledgeable fans, who stayed away in droves the past two summers, and more of the same will be a tough sell, regardless of how nice the food court is. To make his team a success, Mr. Bouton is going to need the support of the business community he unfairly trashed, most notably Berkshire Bank and GE Plastics, as corrupt and dishonest in “Foul Ball.” Mr. Bouton had better hope the business community is more charitable to him than he was to them.

Claws out… But Bouton seems to have come upon a stroke of good luck in recent weeks with a connection to some Pittsfield-related headlines. In mid-May, baseball historian John Thorn (author of Total Baseball) revealed his discovery of a 1791 Pittsfield ordinance mentioning baseball. Thorn shared his finding with Bouton, who told city officials. It’s a nice bit of synergy for the Bulldog’s bid, not to mention a fascinating discovery in and of itself. According to Thorn, “It’s clear that not only was baseball played here in 1791, but it was rampant. It was rampant enough to have an ordinance against it.”

No ball in the house? Try no ball within 80 yards of the house. Passed on September 5, 1791, the ordinance (as excerpted in the San Jose Mercury News) reads:

… for the Preservation of the Windows in the New Meeting House … no Person or Inhabitant of said Town, shall be permitted to play at any game Called Wicket, Cricket, Base ball, Bat ball, Foot ball, Cat, Fives or any other Game or Games with Balls, within the Distance of Eighty Yards from said Meeting House.

I’d wager some kids must have hit a few through the glass of enough dudes in powdered wigs to piss them off so badly that they passed a law. But “New Meeting House” makes me hope that the kids reduced the old one to rubble with their projectiles, as if to say, “We don’t need no stinking wigs. It’s a whole new ballgame, Jack.” In any event, the discovery led Thorn to proclaim, “Pittsfield is baseball’s birthplace until further notice. We know that baseball was like a field of dandelions in the late 1700s and early 1800s_it was growing up everywhere”

Prior to his discovery, the earliest baseball reference was thought to be a pair of 1823 newspaper articles. So screw Abner Doubleday and that cheesy Cooperstown 1839 myth. And bully for the Bulldog if the discovery helps Pittsfield get a new club in an old park and what is now the game’s oldest town.