As Katz shared, in your mind, one can see and feel things from a baseball field that others may miss. It may sound corny, but on opening day of baseball season, when I walk through the portal into Turner Field and see that fresh, new green of the field mixed with the smells of cut grass and the game, I get a certain renewal and joy that a new season brings. you could stand here and watch… five-year-olds lost in clover at this corner, ten-year-olds spitting seeds at the other, fifteen-year-olds brandishing metal spikes… I would guide Max through that circuit… in this one extraordinary park, I would see him grow into a young man.” The effect was at once lush and windswept. Yes, there are some pansies who don’t appreciate sports being injected into these discussions, but baseball, in particular, can be the basis for a powerful story and a metaphor for life.įrom the book comes this quote: “It was a natural stadium, geologically perfect… the homerun fence curling through a wall of green. True-life stories that include beating the bad guys and father-son bonding is a good start for a successful writing formula. Yet if you like really good writing, and the complications of parenting and other deep human relationships, plus a hard-wrangled dollop of redemption, and a down and dirty look at LA life viewed through the lens of kids’ baseball (or if you like any three out of those four), Jesse Katz’s The Opposite Field is very likely a book you shouldn’t miss. It was wonderful and messy … mixed up with all the complications of race and class and geography and culture, somewhere between Touch of Evil and Desperate Housewives.”įar be it for me to tell you what you ought to be reading. “Standing in the center of it all,” Katz concludes, “I looked around in amazement at what we had created, how a park that had been given up for dead was now spilling with life. Father and son bond over baseball, fall out in the usual ways of fathers and sons and ultimately reconnect on the fields of La Loma, where every player, however much a nebbish, gets a trophy, gets the opportunity to remember and be remembered in the game. In season and out, Katz remains a believer in parks-and-rec baseball, the return of spring, and tradition. To save the game—to prolong a boyhood of afternoons—Katz reinvented himself as the “commissioner” of La Loma baseball, out-hustled his detractors, swelled participation by hundreds of new players and kept the accounts clean. Worse, Katz discovered, the joy of baseball at La Loma was being spoiled by the old regime through its meanness, its callousness toward talentless players and its faithlessness in the service of the game. Until then, the veteranos of the club had been quietly taking a cut from registration fees, snack bar sales and the purchase of uniforms, equipment and trophies. The Monterey Park Sports Club needed rules when Max signed up for T-ball and Katz became the volunteer coach of his team. It’s about desire and its consequences, some of them awful.” “‘The Opposite Field,'” writes Waldie, “is a lot like Los Angeles. Waldie has reviewed the book for TruthDig and his take is pitch perfect. Whereas Jesse’s book reminds me of just why-despite the insane level of traffic, the city’s Olympic class problems, the state’s fiscal meltdown, and the general craziness of El Lay-so many of us cling to the place with a passionate fervor. I usually find myself slightly depressed by that other ilk of supposed LA books, which seem to be about some kind of skewed Westside/Hollywoodesque vision of Los Angeles that has little to do with a city that I recognize or would have chosen to make my home. I love Jesse’s memoir for a lot of reasons, primary among them is the fact that it is truly an LA tale-in a way that so many books pretending to be about our city of angels are not. He is also an insightful cultural analyst and a prose stylist of elegance and great grace.Īll his skills are brought to bear in this book, which is about baseball and fatherhood and divorce and love and loss and, in the midst of all the rest, about rescuing a kids’ baseball diamond,L La Loma field in Monterey Park. Jesse is a former LA Times gang reporter, two-time Pulitzer winner and, up-until-recently, an LA Magazine feature writer. Saturday night, my pal Jesse Katz had a book reading at Vroman’s in Pasadena, for his newly released memoir, The Opposite Field.
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