The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw

by Michael Sokolove

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743278852
• ISBN13: 9780743278850
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Good Book

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.

Outstanding Book!

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.

Urban commentary within a baseball story

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.

The Ticket Out? Maybe not.

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.

Literary Grand Slam

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.