Customer Reviews

The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw

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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.

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.

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.

I could hardly put this book down. It is so much more than a story about baseball. I don't like the Mets, and I never cared for Darryl Strawberry. This book is really about neither. Instead, it is a social commentary about the plight of the black man in one arena of life. The small window of opportunity that some find while it eludes others (or others elude it); The subtle racism that seeps even into sport - it's all in this book, but the author doesn't hit you over the head with it. By the end, you feel compassion for some, pity for others, and rejoice in the triumph of a few. If you are looking for just a baseball book, you need to find a lesser story. This transcends baseball.

This book was truly an outstanding piece of work. When I purchased it, I thought it would mostly be about Darryl Strawberry and a little about the others. I was wrong, Michael Sokolove does an outstanding job researching (and you can see he has spent countless hours finding out information about all the players and Brooks Hurst) and portraying each of the individuals who made up the team. One gets to know the individuals and the author makes you want to reach out to those who got caught up in the inner city after their opportunity to leave was lost. The only part missing from this book was the only player drafted not to be profiled: Lee Mays. The book leaves you wondering what happened to him.

This feels more like a story about the black experience in Southern California than about baseball explicitly. Sokolove does an excellent job of balancing the story of the 1979 Crenshaw HS baseball team, and the individual members of that team, with contextual information and theories about class and the dream of becoming a professional athlete (the "ticket out" of the title).

Some of this contextual information includes learning more about the westward migration of African Americans; their continued migration towards a better life as they move further west within Los Angeles; and some important background information on California's "three strikes" law, which greatly impacts one of the former Crenshaw players. A great theme that persists throughout all of this is the desire for a better life, and how baseball embodied (and affected) this desire for the Crenshaw players and their families.

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.

An "excellent" book. A story detailing many people, but, in particular a person of "exceptional ability" and "train wreck" personality. A book everyone should read and learn from. It's a "fine line" that seperates any of us from following the path "Darryl Strawberry" took. Get it, Read it, Pass it on.

This book had the potential to be very very good and frankly fell short. The author, rather than follow the various players with anecdotes, instead seems to write the same paragraph over and over again about how the players had trouble coping with real life situation as a result of being coddled in high school. I've read books about individual players and most authors will let you live those players lives through events they faced over a period of years. This book is just way short on actual events. i.e. "Darryl's AA coach too easily looked the other way while Darryl failed to give 100%. They were awed by Darry'l potential etc." I'd much rather hear about an actual game where Darryl failed to cut a ball off in the gap resulting in extra base hits and the following the game went out slept w/ X, Y and Z and did Q drugs.

Not a terrible book, just very disapointing.

I bought this book for my son, who has faced his own challenges in a world that pre-judges who he might be. It moved him, inspired him, gave him both hope and the courage to keep making forward progress.

I have to say, I was a little mislead by the subtitle of this book, Darryl Strawberry and the boys of Crenshaw. I was expecting the book to give me more about the boys, and what happened to them, both during their days at Crenshaw and afterwards.
The author provides some of that, but he also provides alot of social commentary. Now, while it was interesting to learn of the conditions of the prisons in the 1990s, and the affect of the three strikes law, I wanted to learn more about what happened to the guys, and why. To hear more about baseball.
Still, overall it's a good book. Just doesn't really delve too deeply into it's title subjects.