The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw

by Andrew Milner

The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw

By Michael Sokolove Simon & Schuster, 291 pp., $24.95

On a June night in 1979, two Los Angeles high school teams battled for the city championship at Dodger Stadium. The heavily favored team from Crenshaw High -- a black and Hispanic group from South Central L.A. who many considered the best high school team ever -- were upset by a team led by a teenaged John Elway. After the game Crenshaw's star hitter, a 17-year-old Darryl Strawberry, "ran out to center field and cried like a damn baby. The coach had to talk to him. Ö The whole rest of the team was ready to go, and he had to be coaxed onto the bus."

What became of Strawberry and his teammates over the last quarter century is the subject of Michael Sokolove's engrossing book The Ticket Out. Sokolove, formerly with the Inquirer, does an excellent job contrasting Strawberry's public self-destruction with the private struggles of his classmates to escape big-city poverty.

Strawberry was signed by the New York Mets out of high school, and by 1986 he'd led the Mets to the World Series. While his near-Hall of Fame career was derailed by personal shortcomings -- namely, domestic violence and drugs -- he was welcomed by team after team so long as he could hit the long ball. Strawberry's recklessness had a literal price as well: "He made about $30 million in baseball," Sokolove reports, "and at the end of his playing career had virtually nothing left."

Sokolove compares Strawberry to Crenshaw's catcher, Carl Jones. The son of a well-off contractor, Jones was a seemingly disciplined kid. But his adult problems with drugs resulted in three convictions for petty burglaries -- thus sending him to prison for life under California's ironically named "three strikes" law. "I pray to God for another chance," Jones says from a correctional facility. What's more heartless, Sokolove asks us, a society giving up on someone like Jones after just three missteps, or one that permits Strawberry to make dozens of mistakes without being obligated to learn from them?

Ultimately, Sokolove doesn't have enough space to tell Strawberry's life story and the stories of a dozen or so of his high school teammates thoroughly enough (the white coach, Brooks Hurst, comes off as particularly one-dimensional). But we do learn that Crenshaw second baseman Cordie Dillard now makes as much as $100,000 a year as a plumber, and former Crenshaw slugger Reggie Dymally became an accomplished kosher chef. As with any high school reunion, The Ticket Out offers pleasant surprises in seeing people grow up.

-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there