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

Michael Sokolove (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 28, 2006

The year was 1979 and the fifteen teenagers on the Crenshaw High Cougars were the most talented team in the history of high school baseball. Most of the team were drafted into professional baseball. Two of them, Darryl Strawberry and Chris Brown, would reunite as teammates on a National League All-Star roster. But Michael Sokolove's The Ticket Out is more a story of promise denied than of dreams fulfilled.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sokolove, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, has written a passionate, heartbreaking yet sympathetic look at what happens when schoolyard dreams meet the "cold-blooded business" of professional baseball. After writing a 2001 magazine profile on Strawberry, who after high school quickly rose to superstar status with the New York Mets only to decline into an ongoing struggle with drugs, Sokolove decided to further explore "where he came from and what produced this tragic American icon." He found the answer by looking in depth at the 1979 Crenshaw High baseball team-"the greatest assemblage of talent in the whole history of high school baseball"-and the inner city Los Angeles community that produced him. Sokolove weaves a cautionary tale of the role baseball once played in the inner city, where sports is not a fantasy but a "reality based" way to try to avoid falling into gang life. Culling from in-depth interviews with players, coaches and family members from South Central L.A., Sokolove paints Strawberry as an extremely gifted athlete for whom baseball was a ticket out, but who "emerged from inner city L.A. as damaged goods." This is the most insightful account written so far about the roots of Strawberry's troubled life: "It's hard to say what is the greater marvel; that he laid waste to his career or that he managed to have one at all." But equally moving is the story of Carl Jones, another star player whose descent into drug abuse and robbery has earned him a sentence of 25 years to life under California's "three strikes" law.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"The Ticket Out does for baseball what the 1994 movie Hoop Dreams did for basketball."

-- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"The Ticket Out is an emotional detective story about baseball, moving and thought-provoking."

-- Sally Jenkins, coauthor with Lance Armstrong of It's Not About the Bike and Every Second Counts

"More than the sad saga of Darryl Strawberry, The Ticket Out examines and explodes an American myth: that athletic skill offers a magic shortcut to happiness and success."

-- Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down

"The Ticket Out raises some serious questions about the meaning of fair play."

-- Sports Illustrated

"A terrific read, made to work by Sokolove's insightful reporting and deft writing."

-- The Chicago Tribune

"Michael Sokolove knows a good story when he sees one, and the tale he tells in The Ticket Out about the often sorrowful lives of Darryl Strawberry and his high school baseball teammates is powerful indeed."

-- The Washington Post

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (March 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743278852
• ISBN-13: 978-0743278850
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,457,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Literary Grand Slam, April 6, 2004

By 

Bruce E. Beans (Warrington, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw (Hardcover)

Doggedly reported, eloquently written and extraordinarily moving, "The Ticket Out" examines what happens when something to which we've devoted our entire life ends -- or in the tragic case of Darryl Strawberry, when it doesn't.

How good was the 1979 Crenshaw High baseball team, for which the sullen, sad-eyed Strawberry, then a junior, played right-field? The following year, when he was a senior, Strawberry was selected by the New York Mets as the nation's No. 1 draft pick. Yet he wasn't good enough to be the MVP of his L.A. high school baseball league. That honor went to Reggie Dymally, his Crenshaw teammate who went on to become, if you can believe it, a successful kosher chef.

The tale of Reggie's transformation from a muscular inner city ballplayer to a king of kosher kitchens is just one example of Sokolove's deft touch in patiently bringing each member of this intriguing baseball team alive. He's empathatic but unflinching in his portraits of L.A.'s impoverished, black South Central neighborhood; Crenshaw's unbelievably talented yet utterly human baseball players; their parents; and their white coach. Abandon all of your stereotypes, all ye readers who enter here. Driven? The mother of the McNealy twins moved them from the Bay Area to L.A. when they were eight because L.A. was where the best baseball was played. One slugger, Marvin McWhorter, read Ted Williams' "The Science of Hitting" four times.

Transcending baseball and sport, "The Ticket Out" is a book-length essay on both race in America and the American dream -- and the often infinitely fine line that separates some of us from achieving or not achieving it.

One final note: If you've had your fill of reading about navel-gazing superstars such as Strawberry who've squandered away all their riches and god-given talent, read "The Ticket Out" any way. Sokolove elevates Strawberry -- "I've never had a problem hitting," he tells the author, "I had a problem living" -- to a new level of understanding. But as Sokolove and Strawberry's teammates will perceptively tell you, the Boys of Crenshaw were about so much more than just Darryl Strawberry. In Sokolove's first-rate book, they still are.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Double game, May 16, 2004

By 

Keith Levenberg (New York, N.Y. USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw (Hardcover)

The Ticket Out tells the story of about a dozen prodigiously talented baseball players at Los Angeles's Crenshaw High School in the late 1970s. In author Michael Sokolove's account, they played with the flair and precision of Major Leaguers when still only kids and were scouted with history-making intensity. Nearly the whole of Crenshaw's 1979 team was drafted into pro ball, yet with the exception of Darryl Strawberry, it's unlikely you've ever heard of any of them. Their story as told by Sokolove resonates with tragedy, classically understood, and it's difficult to improve on the synopsis of the book's themes offered by Mark Bowden in his blurb on the back cover: "that even the most amazingly gifted athlete remains a product of his community, his family, and most important, himself." Crenshaw's players climbed within reach of stardom, but each imploded, one by one, as his mental constitution proved ill prepared for the challenges and temptations that presented themselves on the way up. Some lacked drive, others failed to appreciate the opportunities given to them, and many succumbed to drug addiction and petty crime.

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars LIFE + SPORTS = LIFE, April 26, 2005

By 

Gary Davis "Eye Read" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw (Hardcover)

One of the greatest anomalies associated with athletics is that the "Best" are many times not successful. Talk to any professional athlete and they can tell you stories about great athletes that they played with or against that were better than they were, or even better than anyone that they had ever seen, but didn't make it to the pros or into to world class competitions. The variables of injuries, families, lack of discipline, luck or just plain life can wreck the possibility of any athletic career. Every practice, game, interview or even date can end the journey. More than any other profession, whether they show respect for it or not, professional athletes will tell you that they are one of the luckiest people on Earth. Their talent, luck and extreme level of desire does set them apart from most mortal men. The Ticket Out is one of the best presentations on how Life plus Sports usually just equals Life.

The Boys Of Crenshaw each had all the talent and training requirements necessary to be successful professional baseball players. Although they didn't really know it then, their team is American legend and they provide us with a very compelling drama. As a team they were the perfect research data pool to logically examine life and sports. As a group whose careers were not affected by major injuries their results of everything from incarceration with "three strikes" to one of the greatest natural home run hitters to ever play the game really does cover all possibilities, except the status of hero.

Sports or not, everyone in the game of life is dealt a hand. Even a group of the "Best of the Best" still have to deal with their own personal hand of cards. The Ticket Out shows how if you start in South Central Los Angeles, trying to be successful in any profession, it's a challenge. Although the exposure and training is there, the baggage a Black family carries to California in a migration for a better life can be a lot to overcome. Also children growing up in a community that is not always honest with itself can make life very daring.

Through baseball, The Ticket Out is really a great story about how South Central Los Angeles was created and how it can effect even the greatest talents. This baseball book about life is very interesting. I think we need more books that use our common interests to discuss our lives.

The most disturbing thing for any real baseball fan will be the lack of discussion about Lee May, who did have a real professional baseball career.

Unfortunately, people that are not into baseball will probably not buy this book and miss out on one of the most simple yet informative discussions on prison terms and the "three strikes" laws that you will ever find.

I'm a baseball fan and The Ticket Out provides a lot of interesting baseball and a lot of Daryl Strawberry legend, but it's really about Life + Sports = Life.