The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw [Hardcover]

I wondered upon finishing the book, whether Sokolove ultimately sees sports as an insidious force within society and within this story. With the way the game treats several of the players, many of whom find their "ticket out" to be nothing of the sort, this could certainly be one possible conclusion. But the way Sokolove writes about baseball, and captures the former Crenshaw players' persistent love of the game, belies the fact that many of the players (and Sokolove himself) still love the game and are, at worst, ambivalent about the effect sports had on their lives. This includes Darryl Strawberry (one of my favorite players growing up), whose successes and failures in professional baseball are well known, but still upsetting.

Finally, one of the most rewarding aspects of the book is that Sokolove's process becomes a part of the story, as he brings the players back together again for the first time in many years. He does this in such a way as to convey the significance and poignancy of the occasion without being overly sentimental. Overall, this is an excellent book that I'd highly recommend.

If Sokolove's interpretation of events has any shortcomings, it's that his affection for his subjects planted in him their own self-delusion that the fact of their immense talent should have made Major League stardom inevitable. At that level of play, any number of factors, from the intensity of the competition to the vagaries of random chance, can intercede to thwart a promising career, and nature allocates preciously the hunger, drive, and perfectionism necessary to excel. Given that perspective, if the tragedy of Crenshaw is more compelling than any other, it is only the high profile of Strawberry's own implosion, or the social context of inner-city Los Angeles, that would make it so. Sokolove, a New York Times contributor, favors the latter view, and he gratuitously laces the narrative with the guilty metropolitan liberal's obsession with race and hand-wringing over economic inequality. This compulsion to iconify each player as a martyr of social injustice is overwrought and in tension with the author's otherwise commendable rendering of them as individuals, each with his own strengths and frailties. In some cases, the acridity of inner-city L.A. proved every bit as determinative in snatching defeat from victory as Sokolove presumes, but in other respects the Crenshaw kids' upbringing equipped them to succeed in baseball as well as anyone could hope. With sandlot games in every park, these kids literally grew up on the game, developed all the right instincts, and eventually found in Crenshaw's coach a patriarch who seems to have instilled real discipline and professionalism. As with all tragedies, the internal human dramas are the most compelling. The knowledge that they won't end well, and the realization that the parks in such communities today are populated instead with the football and basketball prospects of tomorrow, give the story an elegiac tone, both for the boys of Crenshaw and the game itself.