Rating: 
Summary: The Ticket Out? Maybe not.
Review: 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.
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