MOYERS: Why do you all up there care so much about Wahconah Park?

BOUTON: Well it's, you know, we didn't think it was going to be such a big deal. You know, baseball's been played on that site since 1892. It's one of the last of the wooden ballparks. It's ranked as one of the top baseball viewing experiences in the country. SPORTS ILLUSTRATED called it "a little bit of heaven." It's known as…

MOYERS: Field of Dreams.

BOUTON: …a great baseball cathedral. A step back in time. Rockwell-esque. You know, all those adjectives. And you know, people sort of chart their lives through baseball. That's what makes baseball a great sport is that people root for teams that their grandfathers rooted for. They go to these old ballparks and it's a piece of their family history. And that's why people want to preserve the ballpark.

MOYERS: And you had a plan to save it?

BOUTON: Yeah. Our plan was, my partner and I had an idea to gather some investors and renovate the old ballpark. And then buy a team in the local independent league and sell stock to the people of Pittsfield and surrounding Berkshire County so that Pittsfield would have its own locally-owned baseball team, playing in its restored historic ballpark.

MOYERS: And no taxpayer money in this?

BOUTON: No taxpayer money whatsoever.

MOYERS: Who could be opposed to that?

BOUTON: Well, nobody in town was opposed to it. Everybody… 95 percent of the people wanted it. The only opposition we had was from THE BERKSHIRE EAGLE.

MOYERS: The local newspaper.

BOUTON: The local newspaper. In Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the only daily newspaper in town is THE BERKSHIRE EAGLE. And they were behind a movement to build a new baseball stadium in the center of town, on property, coincidentally owned by THE BERKSHIRE EAGLE. And this was a new stadium, that the people of Pittsfield had voted against three different times.

MOYERS: Voted down?

BOUTON: Voted down. Voted against it clearly, decisively. And yet it kept rearing its head.

MOYERS: Who was the group that wanted to build the stadium?

BOUTON: BERKSHIRE EAGLE. Berkshire Bank, the largest bank in town. Cain, Hibbard, Myers and Cook, the largest law firm. And General Electric — a guy from GE, the head of their global communications department was one of the backers of this new baseball stadium.

I call them the gang of four. They wanted this new stadium built on this property owned by the newspaper.

And we said to them, "Look. Take your eighteen and a half million dollars of taxpayer money, and put something else in that location. Build a concert hall. An indoor arena. A civic center. We'll take care of the baseball fans, at Waconah Park." But no. They insisted. They didn't want the old ballpark. Because the old ballpark… restoring the ballpark and putting a locally-owned team in there would have put a stake in the heart of the new stadium. And they wanted to put a new stadium on that location.

MOYERS: You were up not just against the newspaper but a newspaper that had a stake in the opposing plan.

BOUTON: Right, right. THE BERKSHIRE EAGLE not only owned the property on which the new stadium would be built. The property was polluted. They never told the people that it was polluted. And they had an economic interest in the outcome of it because it would enhance the value of their property, plus relieve them of the liability of a cleanup. That would have passed to the people of Pittsfield had they voted for a new stadium.

And I guessed early on that there might be some toxic waste on that site. And a baseball stadium, which doesn't go down into the ground, would make a nice band-aid. A band-aid over a tumor. Almost any other kind of a building, an indoor arena, a civic center, a concert hall, would have to go down deep, where bad stuff might be found. Whereas a baseball stadium sits on slabs, and you have the large outfield there.

MOYERS: So the newspaper wanted to build a stadium, with public funds, on a piece of property the newspaper owned.

BOUTON: And that they knew was polluted, and they never told the people it was polluted. As a matter of fact, after I started writing the book, a friend of mine who did some investigation at the DEP in Springfield, Massachusetts, found a document called a Release Notification Form. This is a document that confirmed that that property was polluted. The date on the release notification form was January 12th, 2001. This is five months before the people of Pittsfield would be asked to vote for or against the new stadium. Had they voted for a new stadium, they would have inherited the pollution on that property. As a matter of fact, the first public notice of that property being polluted, was when I printed the document, the Release Notification Form, on page 360 of my book. Only then did the newspaper acknowledge that the property was polluted.

MOYERS: Did they ever disclose that they owned the land on which the new stadium would be built?

BOUTON: Yeah. Oh, yeah. And they were gonna, quote, "donate" it to the city of Pittsfield. But of course the stadium would have been built on that land. And they would have been able to cover up the toxic waste.

MOYERS: What did you do then? What happened?

BOUTON: Well, first of all we went to the City Council. And the City Council, James Massery, one of the Councilman, said that the City Council couldn't do anything until they were released by Andy Mick. Andy Mick is the publisher of the newspaper. So, we went to Andy Mick. And we said, "What about our proposal?"

He said, "You'll have to talk to my boss in Denver, Colorado." So, here were the people of Pittsfield, their baseball legacies, in the hands of a guy in Denver.

MOYERS: When you began this, did you know that THE BERKSHIRE EAGLE was owned by the media group based in Denver?

BOUTON: No. No I thought THE BERKSHIRE EAGLE was a local paper. I mean I was…

MOYERS: You didn't know that it was one of 50 newspapers owned by Dean Singleton.

BOUTON: No.

MOYERS: SALT LAKE TRIBUNE. THE LA DAILY NEWS. THE DENVER POST. You didn't know that?

BOUTON: No, I didn't know that. I found that out after a while. But I didn't know that going in.

MOYERS: And so this publisher, the hired publisher said, "You've gotta go see him"?

BOUTON: The publisher of the newspaper said we had to talk to Dean Singleton, in Denver, Colorado. To restore a baseball park in Pittsfield.

MOYERS: Did you do that?

BOUTON: Yeah. We contacted him. We wrote letters to him, and I even sent him an autographed copy of BALL FOUR. And never heard from him.

MOYERS: So the local publisher didn't really have the power to act independently.

BOUTON: He was being controlled by his boss in Denver. And the local politicians were being controlled by the local publisher. So there was sort of a puppeteer working through another puppet, running this… controlling the decisions that were made by the local government.

MOYERS: What is it like to go up against a paper like that in a fight like this?

BOUTON: Well, you feel... First of all, you feel alone. And you feel like, you know, you can't be heard. You feel like you're walking down the street trying to shout out your idea because you're constantly fighting the daily paper which is out there every single morning. Our only defense against this, my partner and I, was to go on local radio shows. And sometimes we'd try to go online the night before, read the morning headline in THE BERKSHIRE EAGLE, craft a response to that headline at two or three o'clock in the morning. See if we could arrange to get on a radio show in the morning so we could be on a radio at 9:00 countering that day's headline in THE BERKSHIRE EAGLE.

And that was really our best shot. Or wait for a city council meeting which happened once every two weeks. Go to the city council meeting. Take advantage of a three-minute open mic period and make our case during... in these three-minute little segments. This turned out to be a full-time job. And here we were having to spend all our time around the clock to get our message out in the face of this newspaper. I said to my wife at one point, I said, "Who else but my partner and I, Chip Elitzer, who else but Chip and I could do a thing like this?" And my wife said, "Single people mostly."

The average citizen doesn't have that. Plus, I have a bit of a profile from having written BALL FOUR. And I played for the Yankees. And so I was able to get more notice than someone else. But if we had just been, I mean, really private citizens with regular jobs, we would have gotten steamrollered in terms of getting our message out there. As it was, we got steamrollered anyway.

MOYERS: Did the newspaper cover this story while it was happening?

BOUTON: They distorted the whole story. They misrepresented our proposal. First of all, for a while, they said we had no plan. Then we said we didn't have enough money. And then they were calling us carpetbaggers, even though we were from the same county. It was biased reporting. Conflict of interest. We just...

MOYERS: Why did you decide to write a book?

BOUTON: Well, first of all, I started keeping notes on this book fairly early in the game. I didn't go into it with the intention of writing a book. But when the city councilman told me that they were beholden to the local newspaper, and when the publisher of the local newspaper said he was beholden to his owner out in Denver, that's when I started keeping notes for the book.

MOYERS: You earned a reputation many years ago for telling the truth with BALL FOUR. Now you've done it again. What does telling the truth do to you?

BOUTON: I don't know, you know. I don't really go looking for trouble. I wrote BALL FOUR because I wanted to share the fun of baseball. I wasn't interested in telling the truth. But in sharing the fun a few truths got told, I guess. But that really wasn't my purpose. I wanted to share the fun. I wanted to write BALL FOUR.

FOUL BALL, on the other hand, I felt I had to write this book. I felt compelled to write it. I had, you know, I had access to a story that seemed shocking to me.

MOYERS: Quite a case study, I mean.

BOUTON: FOUL BALL is a case study of what can happen when a distant media conglomerate owns the only daily newspaper in town. And the story didn't end with that because it continued when I tried to get the book published. The publisher of the book, the proposed publisher I had signed a contract with, PublicAffairs, the publisher.

MOYERS: A company based here in New York...

BOUTON: A company based in New York City. Just before…

MOYERS: Very successful company.

BOUTON: Yeah. Very successful company. Just before they were gonna put the book FOUL BALL in their catalog, and they had mapped out a book tour, and they were gonna arrange dinner with buyers at Barnes and Noble. They were saying this was gonna be their big book of the spring.

At that point, the publisher of PublicAffairs, the President of the company, Peter Osnos, sat down and told me at lunch that I would need to get balancing comments from General Electric for whatever I was saying about them in the book. And I said, "I'm not gonna do that. I didn't get balancing comments from Major League Baseball when I wrote BALL FOUR. And I'm not gonna do that with FOUL BALL." I said, "Let them write their own book."

Then he tells me that the top lawyer for General Electric is a friend of his. And he was gonna become a partner in PublicAffairs. A week after that, the editor with whom I've been working on the book told me I had to remove all references to pollution and General Electric, or they weren't gonna publish the book. [See note at end of transcript.]

I said, "Well, that's ridiculous. I'm not doing that. I want a termination letter." They wouldn't give me one. Months went by. I finally had to hire a lawyer to get my termination letter. And during the discussions about whether they were gonna give me a termination letter, the lawyer for PublicAffairs told my agent that I could keep half of my advance if I promise not to say why I was leaving PublicAffairs. I told my agent, I said, "I don't know what my price for silence is, but I know it's not $25,000."

MOYERS: So you took...

BOUTON: So I left.

MOYERS: And you published the book yourself?

BOUTON: Yeah. I had to. It was too late for me to sign a contract with another publisher. And I wanted it to be out in June of this year. So I published it myself.

MOYERS: And the response to it?

BOUTON: Well, the response is very good. It's a very good word of mouth. So, I have a guerilla marketing campaign, where I speak on college campuses in exchange for honorariums and travel expenses, and sign books at the local bookstores. It's in its second printing, and it's been getting reviewed by a few newspapers. But you know, here again, a lot of the major media will not review a self-published book.

MOYERS: Did GE respond, when you raised the question of the toxic dump? Have they responded to the book?

BOUTON: No, no. They haven't responded to the book except for the action with the publisher. I haven't heard from General Electric.

MOYERS: You haven't been able to prove that the toxic waste down there was put there by General Electric.

BOUTON: Right, no, but they've been dumping PCBs all over that town since 1937. And you know they've been denying that PCBs are dangerous. And they've been denying that PCBs are in this location and that location. And yet a group called Housatonic River Initiative has been finding PCBs buried… barrels of PCBs, that kind of thing. The test borings that showed the property was polluted, that an environmentalist friend of mine discovered, showed that it was toxic oils, but not necessarily PCBs.

However, there are test borings on that same property that have been done, that have never been made public. And I don't know whether those test borings would show PCBs or not. I just found it curious, that I would be told I had to remove references to pollution, and General Electric from the book, so.

MOYERS: Have you run into Mr. Mick, the publisher of the paper since the book came out?

BOUTON: No. No.

MOYERS: Have they reviewed the book?

BOUTON: No.

MOYERS: Are the people in Pittsfield reading it?

BOUTON: Oh, yeah.

MOYERS: It's selling there?

BOUTON: It's selling very very... It's doing very, very well. It's being sold in Pittsfield. And they're handing around to each other. I've been told by people that as soon as the book came out they were on the phone reading excerpts of it to each other over the telephone.

You know, the book presents such a different view of the story. Stunningly different. And the people of Pittsfield have come up to me on the street and said to me, "Yes. Thank you for telling our story. We've been up against this for years and we've never been able to do anything about it." You know, most of the people in Pittsfield are beholden to — I call them the Gang of Four — for their jobs, for the jobs of their children, their cousins, their relatives. They can't speak out against these people. They can't stand up.

I had an opportunity to be in on the inside of things. And I don't need THE BERKSHIRE EAGLE or the bank or the law firm or GE, so I was in a position to tell this story. And I felt that I owed it to the people of Pittsfield to write this book.

MOYERS: What have you learned about media conglomeration?

BOUTON: It's not good. And you can't have democracy when you have that. Because it's a lack of democracy in Pittsfield basically because the local newspaper is not doing its watchdog function.

MOYERS: You say you can't have democracy. What do you mean?

BOUTON: Well, when you have a city council that admits and it says it's beholden to the local newspaper, how can that be democratic? The newspaper didn't elect the city council. The citizens of Pittsfield elected the city council. They should be beholden to the people, not beholden to the local newspaper.

MOYERS: This has made you an advocate against media concentration.

BOUTON: Yeah, I mean, I really didn't know… I sort of, I've been aware of the problem. But I didn't know how it actually worked at the local level. So this was a firsthand example to see how the media conglomeration, the ownership of this paper by a guy in Denver, how it affected the local community.

He was one of those who made the case at the FCC hearings that guys like him should be able to own even more newspapers and more television stations.

MOYERS: Under the new rules proposed by the FCC it's conceivable that that newspaper could own some of the radio stations in town as well, right?

BOUTON: Yeah.

MOYERS: And then would you have gotten your story out?

BOUTON: Oh, under the new rules, Dean Singleton would have been able to own the local television station.

MOYERS: And if he'd owned the radio stations you probably would not have gotten your story out except by handbill, right?

BOUTON: That's right. That's right. If THE BERKSHIRE EAGLE owned the only television station in town and a radio station or two we wouldn't have been able to make our case to the people.

MOYERS: Why should people out there who don't live in and around Pittsfield care about this?

BOUTON: Well, I would guess that this is a story that's gonna be happening to them pretty soon if it hasn't already happened. First of all, the stadium issue is a national story. Team owners, wealthy team owners force local communities to either build them stadiums with taxpayer dollars or they move the team to another town. So that's happening all over the country at the major league level and at the minor league level.

And then, you know, you've got the issue of a single newspaper in town. We have that situation in a lot of towns. So you have the stadium issue. You have the newspaper issue.

MOYERS: Has this made you cynical?

BOUTON: Um...

MOYERS: You were cynical about baseball and...

BOUTON: I've always been an optimistic person. My wife calls me a pathological optimist. And you know, I got scared at the end of this story.

MOYERS: Why?

BOUTON: I got scared because of the power that I saw in the local daily newspaper having so much power over the community, which I never realized until I got involved with the stadium issue. The fact that we'd be told to remove passages from the book that had to do with pollution or General Electric.

The fact that the newspaper was gonna quote "donate" property to the City of Pittsfield that was polluted and they never told the people it was polluted. I mean, this is fraud.

MOYERS: The book is FOUL BALL. The author is Jim Bouton. Thank you for being with us.

BOUTON: My pleasure, Bill.

[Note: PublicAffairs and General Electric deny these allegations. Jim Bouton stands by them.]