* A millionaire pizza baron and sports team owner wants more corporate luxury seating than his historic old ballpark provides, so he demands a new stadium at taxpayer expense, claiming the old one is about to collapse. * The billionaire co-founder of Microsoft wants to buy a football team, but only if the state will build him a costly new facility. So he pays $4 million to hold a public referendum--then spends millions more in advertising to make sure he wins.

This expanded 2nd edition updates the story of the stadium swindle through the year 1998, when a record number of citywide votes decided the fate of proposed sports facilities. Read how citizen activists in North Carolina and Alabama successfully fought off attempts to spend public money on a pair of stadiums. Meanwhile, in Denver and San Diego, championship seasons on the field were used by team owners to boost multimillion-dollar stadium campaigns.

Strange-but-true tales also transfixed stadium observers in 1998: the Toronto Blue Jays' threats to abandon their nearly new dome for a ballpark on the verge of demolition; the New England Patriots' on-again off-again flirtation with Hartford, Connecticut, for $375 million in public money; and the bizarre events of April, when a beam mysteriously fell into the seats at Yankee Stadium, leading to a crisis that would sweep from the South Bronx to the very corridors of City Hall power.

From Seattle Seahawks owner Paul Allen of Microsoft to New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, from the destruction of Tiger Stadium to the building of Camden Yards, the stories are all here. Cagan and deMause recount this astonishing national scandal in a uniquely accessible journalistic style that brings you up close and personal to the moguls who would bilk the public--and to the activists protecting your wallet.

In Field of Schemes, meet Hallie Amey, a public housing resident on Chicago's South Side. When her neighborhood's very existence was threatened by plans for the new Comiskey Park, Amey and others, mostly elderly and low-income, formed a coalition to fight the new-stadium juggernaut.

In Detroit, Frank Rashid and his fellow members of the Tiger Stadium Fan Club fought for ten years against plans to tear down the country's oldest remaining ballpark. Field of Schemes documents their uphill battles--from their late-night genesis at a Detroit pizza parlor to their remarkable public relations victories, and ultimate heartbreaking defeat. "If you don't have money and power," says a now bitter Rashid, "the system will not work for you."

Field of Schemes details how taxpayers, urban residents, and sports fans all come out the losers. Study after study has shown that there is no economic benefit to building a new stadium in your city's downtown--while there is a tremendous "opportunity cost" in the hundreds of millions of dollars in tax money that could have been spent elsewhere. And, having taken the public for a ride, those same new stadiums offer fewer seats--more costly, too--with views oftentimes far worse than at their historic counterparts.