Jim Bouton was one of one. Here the Ball Four author shows the same indomitable love for the game and restless energy that caused such a ruckus before, during, and after the events of Ball Four and its many updates. But this time his energy is focused on trying to preserve and upgrade a historic baseball park in the Berkshires area of Massachusetts in a little backwards town called Pittsfield.
Bouton runs up against all the usual suspects—corrupt developers, polluting out of town corporations, inept politicians, tin pot tyrants in the local media and on and on, in this chronicle of his years-long effort to keep baseball at historic, city-owned Wahconah Park. Filled with Bouton’s usual acerbic observations about anyone he perceives as standing against his goals, this book is a time capsule of America and the politics of the early 2000’s. As ever, Bouton is uniquely able to see how baseball’s deep history and our cultural love for the game clash against the mores and politics of the era to paint a more complex and layered picture than what is a ultimately a game of grown men throwing a ball around would otherwise suggest.
Bouton was a visionary, and it’s hard to read this book in the mid 2020’s and not think about how the Savannah Bananas are thriving as an offshoot of the baseball-related mirth that so many of Bouton’s endeavors capture. The world has realized what the politicians and power players of Pittsfield seemed to have such a hard time with in this book. Simply put, America loves baseball. If you build it, we will come. Wahconah Park is still standing to this day. But Foul Ball captures a time when that was nowhere near a certainty, and shares in great detail what Bouton and his group did to try and preserve it.
If you liked Ball Four, and enjoy Bouton’s first person diarist style, it’s hard to imagine you not enjoying this book, even as most of it involves Bouton banging his head against any wall he can find.