Team efforts

Authors score with three fine new baseball books

Published April 9, 2004 at midnight

Text size

More Books

The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw

By Michael Sokolove (Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, $25).

Grade: A

It's been more than a decade since the publication of Friday Night Lights, a profound work of journalism examining a high school football team and the town that created the team. It was a powerful book and created a new genre. Let's call it "expository nonfiction sports sociology."

The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw elevates that genre to a new peak.

Like Friday Night Lights, The Ticket Out centers on a high school team, in this case one from Los Angeles that included Darryl Strawberry. Strawberry, of course, would go on to have a brilliant career later submarined by drugs.

Strawberry's high school team had another player who would become an all-star in the big leagues, and most of the team went on to play professional baseball at some level.

What made that team so great? What happened to the other players? What really happened to Strawberry?

The Ticket Out starts with those questions, and the answers lead to more questions. All are addressed in this stunning work of journalism.

In some ways, The Ticket Out is Michener-like, explaining the interesting parts of the Crenshaw High School Baseball team of 1979 by starting with the settlement of Los Angeles in 1781.

But the book doesn't tarry, and each detail really does help explain what went on in that year for that team. In many ways, this book is classic new journalism as defined by Tom Wolfe - i.e., lots of "status details" written in a novel-like format.

It's not as if the author, Michael Sokolove, was the first to figure out that this team was special. Dozens of Major League scouts spent time watching the team, and Sports Illustrated even did a story about Strawberry. The team had a lineup that could hit with stunning power, and most of the players on the team even now say Strawberry was perhaps the third- or fourth-best player on the team.

Denver sports fans will be particularly interested in Sokolove's description of the pivotal role that John Elway played in his, and Strawberry's, last high school baseball game. A tenacious fighter even then, Elway single-handedly denied Crenshaw the citywide L.A. high school championship. Sokolove re-creates that game as well as any game could be re-created.

But many baseball books are good at describing what happens in the park. The genius of this book is its exploration of the promise baseball extended to these teens and why it ultimately fell flat.

While plenty of 8-year-olds know in their hearts that they will play for the Yankees someday, most high school kids realize that the chances are akin to winning the lottery. But the Crenshaw team was different, with all the scouts and the press hanging around. And the families and the social structure of South Central L.A. did nothing to dissuade these boys. Life in the Crenshaw neighborhood didn't hold a lot of promise, so playing professional baseball seemed as likely an option as any.

But the promise was never fulfilled. Why not? Society? Yes. Prejudice? Sure. Drugs? Clearly. Sokolove examines those factors but most interestingly explores how the players, so sure-handed on the field, made error after error away from the diamond.

The self-inflicted troubles for the team began early: One player was arrested for beating another boy with a bat because that boy had attacked his brother - never mind that the attacker was already in handcuffs. The environment in which the boys lived led the other players to approve of such action, though they did lament the loss of a good player to the juvenile justice system.

As the boys grew into men, the self-inflicted wounds continued. One player is still in prison, one of the first sentenced under California's "three-strikes" law. The player's third strike: breaking into his old high school. He didn't steal anything, and yet he's now in the middle of a 25-year sentence.

Sokolove examines his case and that law in great detail, juxtaposing discussion of a law named after a baseball rule with the rule itself.

He points out that the "three-strikes" analogy doesn't really hold up. Sure, in baseball it's three strikes and you're out, but you also get four or five chances to bat, and many big-league players getting paid millions of dollars strike out dozens of times a year.

This book is not an uplifting tale, but neither is it a morality play in which we're supposed to learn some life lesson. It's simply journalism at its best: illuminating a topic to give you a deeper understanding of the main characters and the subject. And as any purist will tell you, to understand baseball is to understand life itself.

- Scott C. Yates

The Last Best Season: One Summer, One Season, One Dream

By Jim Collins (DeCapo Press, 288 pages, $24).

Grade: A

Nearly everyone has had that one glorious summer in his life, a season when everything comes into focus, time seems endless and you're fully aware of life's possibilities.

For a couple of hundred young men, a summer spent in the Cape Cod Baseball League affords them the opportunity to experience that magical summer, with one crucial exception: It also presents the possibility that they will, effectively, be winnowed out of the mix of first-class college baseball players in the eyes of professional scouts.

Jim Collins, a college player at Dartmouth during the early 1980s, was among many who, during his day, "talked wistfully about 'playing on the Cape,' as if some kind of aura surrounded the geography itself. We didn't know much about the league or how someone went about getting into it - that was part of the mystique - but we knew that most of us had been team captains and all-stars and most valuable players in high school, and none of us was good enough to play there."

That remains true today. One in six Major Leaguers played in the league, and because only wooden bats are used, pro scouts get a true picture of just how well college stars actually hit. As a result, the scouts are out in full force, seeing how well various prospects do in high-pressure situations, night after night.

Collins spent the entire season with the Chatham A's and had full access to coaches and players. On that team, head coach John Schiffner believed that all but one of the 24 players he'd recruited had a chance to be drafted by the pros.

That unlucky player was Blake Hanan, an infielder from Siena College. Even so, just being where he was made Hanan an accomplished athlete:

"Hanan had already emerged from 3 million kids playing in organized Little Leagues. By the year 2000, he was one of 115,000 boys who had survived competitive play all the way through senior year in high school. He'd become one of the two out of the 50 who had gone on from high school to play baseball at an NCAA college. A year into the future, after his junior spring, he hoped to be among the 800 college players who'd be drafted to play professionally. . . . In the minors, if he made it that far, he'd join the 5,000 players, including hundreds from Latin America and the Caribbean, competing for the ultimate prize: one of just 750 spots on Major League rosters."

Every team was stocked with players with pro potential, and a great deal of down-the-road money could be made or lost based on how well they played during their 10 weeks on Cape Cod. On the Chatham ball club, it was up to coach Schiffner to apportion playing time.

On a team where players had so much at stake, it was difficult to keep everyone happy, yet it was a job Schiffner, who pulled down $5,000 a year for his efforts (along with a $3,000 housing allowance), did very well.

He reaped benefits of his own: "Coaching in the Cape Cod Baseball League placed Schiffner on a national stage. . . . College coaches around the country wooed him. Major League scouts talked to him off the record. Major League players left tickets in John Schiffner's name at Fenway Park in Boston. Being a somebody was hard enough to achieve in any realm - theater, politics, academics, business. Schiffner's stature in the Cape Cod League made him a somebody."

Schiffner, who'd played in the league himself many years before, urged his players to work hard but to have fun, too. So, along with a fair number of serious players, there were partiers who were fond of beer, chasing girls and smoking the occasional joint. The author faithfully chronicles the parties, mornings after and workout sessions in the gym and on the field.

From a fan's perspective, though, he's at his best when describing the games themselves, particularly the A's last home game. The players, who would close on the road the next night, had no shot at postseason play and could well have decided to pack it in. After all, for good or ill, they'd already had their individual seasons, and the scouts had, by and large, made up their minds about their prospects.

But on a night when it came down to playing for pride alone, they played as a team and pulled out an incredible win in extra innings. Collins' description of that game is flat-out brilliant and a three-hanky read for anyone who loves baseball.

This is a no-miss read - one of the best baseball books I've ever come across.

- Ed Halloran

27 Men Out: Baseball's Perfect Games Through History

By Michael Coffey (Atria Books, 287 pages, $25)

Grade: B

In sports as in life, there is so little that can be best-described as "perfect." A golfer's hole in one. A bowler's 300. And in baseball, a pitcher who throws a no-hitter without letting a single opponent reach base: 27 men out.

Most of the time, life is simply trying to approach perfection. But on those rarest of occasions when perfection is actually achieved, it's as if the world slows for a crucial moment. It's as if every witness becomes a participant and, in some odd way, a partner in the experience.

I remember, as a kid, watching Jim Bunning - who would go on to become a Republican U.S. senator from Kentucky - mow down the New York Mets on a Sunday afternoon. Even through the medium of the Magnavox in my aunt's living room, that day remains embedded in my memory like a mica-flecked stone.

Michael Coffey intuitively grasped the impact of such a spectator experience on a muggy Sunday in the Bronx in July 1999, when he took his 8-year-old son Gabriel on a boat ride up the East River to catch a game at Yankee Stadium.

The drama that followed amounted to the perfect game on the perfect day. With Don Larsen - the Yankee who pitched the only perfect World Series game, in 1956 - sitting in the stands for old-timers day, David Cone threw his own perfect game.

Besides a great memory between father and son, Coffey found the framework that day for the final chapter of his immensely entertaining book 27 Men Out.

The book bills itself as a record of perfect games through history, but it's more than that. Coffey tells the story of baseball's history through its perfect games.

To date, there have been 14 of them, spread across the years in such a way as to provide a perfect touchstone for showing how the game has changed over those years while, for the most part, the rules have stayed the same.

Coffey builds each chapter around the pitcher, in a series of profiles about the human being at the heart of each perfect game.

It helps that some wonderful stories are embedded in this string of goose-egg-laden line scores.

We learn, for example, that Denton True "Cy" Young's contemporaries trusted him so much that they let him call balls and strikes on days when the umpire was late to arrive.

There's Larsen's late night of drinking (ginger ale, he claimed) before the day he threw his gem against the Brooklyn Dodgers in Game 5 of the Series.

Larsen was a wild man with a wily manager in Casey Stengel. That spring, Larsen had crashed a car into a tree during spring training. Reporters asked Stengel what the penalty would be.

"Stengel said he could not decide what to do, since perhaps Larsen had not been out too late but rather up too early," Coffey writes.

This isn't a perfect book. The play-by-play of each game is less interesting than the context and personalities surrounding the game. And some chapters feel a bit formulaic. There's always the moment when players realize they're part of something approaching perfection. There's always the superstitious silence that precedes the ending.

But there's also some wonderful drama. By wisely looking beyond the box scores, Coffey says much more about the game and its less-than-perfect players. It's a far more interesting tale than perfection itself.

- John Ensslin

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News