Arguably the most prodigiously gifted high-school baseball team in history, with two future major-leaguers and several other hot prospects among them, the 1979 Crenshaw Cougars ended its season at Dodger Stadium ready to fulfill its rightful destiny as a state champion. The season's final game was freighted with symbolic value, but not of the kind they'd have liked to envision. Playing against a squad of undistinguished suburban kids—the sort of team they took special pride in creaming—Crenshaw's big bats came up empty, swatting long balls that were tamed by the park's pitcher-friendly dimensions. In the fifth inning, their traditional "rally inning," Coach Brooks Hurst inexplicably called on Darryl Strawberry, his most celebrated slugger, to lay down a bunt, which grounded straight to the pitcher. The winning pitcher was a third baseman who hadn't thrown from the hill in six weeks. His name? John Elway, future Hall Of Fame quarterback for the Denver Broncos.
In retrospect, the all-black Crenshaw team's loss to Elway, a golden boy who would achieve glory in another sport, was a clear harbinger of disappointments to come. Expanded from his memorable New York Times Magazine piece on Strawberry, Michael Sokolove's The Ticket Out opens up into a thoughtful and moving inquiry into the famed Class Of '79. As the title suggests, Sokolove explodes the myth that athletics leads inner-city kids to a better station in life; even in those rare cases like Strawberry's, when major-league millions are dumped on their laps, some may be ill-equipped to handle the transition. But beyond a mere sociological tract, the book functions best as a heartfelt piece of portraiture, a class reunion that accounts for the casualties and minor triumphs following faded glories on the diamond.
Now in their 40s, the "Boys Of Crenshaw" all made it out of the neighborhood, though those who never brushed with fame are often better off than those who did. In addition to Strawberry, whose tragic passivity and self-destructive addictions have been relayed many times previously, Sokolove catches up with the other key position players. Former All-Star Chris Brown, the team's biggest weapon, was bounced from the majors after a notorious string of minor injuries and personal conflicts, but wound up a well-paid crane operator in Houston. Some have settled into workaday occupations like plumbing, military policing, and, in the oddest case, cooking kosher foods for Orthodox travel expeditions. Others are less fortunate, including the former catcher serving hard time for victimless felonies under California's "three strikes" initiative.
Sokolove has written about the other side of the diamond before in Hustle: The Myth, Life, And Lies Of Pete Rose, and his plainspoken, journalistic writing style steers clear of the fussy prose and scene-setting that dogs other baseball books. Even if it had nothing to do with the game, even if Sokolove had just followed the varied trajectories of nine random friends from the Crenshaw yearbook, The Ticket Out would still make a fine survey of poverty and race in America. But by clinging to a long-shot dream, the Boys Of Crenshaw encountered a humbling reality that's all the more poignant. Sokolove notes that nearly all of them still refer to themselves as "blessed." Considering the oft-wide disparity between their hopes at age 18 and their middle-age struggles, the word testifies to a remarkably abiding spirit.