A league of their own

Albert's insights into that particular, off-the-tourist-map Los Angeles weren't gained vicariously, or without a price.

"I had known quite a few famous people throughout my life ... and had even experienced a brief glimpse of very minor stardom myself. Not much ... but just enough to know that success doesn't do what most people hope it will."

As the drummer for Bad Religion in the mid-'80s -- "a few years after the group's initial underground success and still some time before a creative resurgence would result in hit singles, gold records, and a dedicated worldwide following" -- Albert is one of thoseguys. He was there. He saw. He survived. Barely.

"On a warm, humid night ... we played to around three thousand kids in an aging downtown boxing arena ... and by all accounts it was a flawless and well-received performance. I even have a videotape to prove it. Yet instead of basking in the post-show glory and dog-piling nubile young groupies or snorting blow at some raucous Hollywood Hills party, I fixated exclusively on the fact that not one of the five people on my personal guest list had shown up. The obvious conclusion was, of course, that I had not a friend in the world, and so my night ended up rather unceremoniously, near the drug-infested fields of MacArthur Park, sitting all alone in my yellow Toyota bumblebee and shooting colorful balloons of Mexican heroin until my money was gone."

Such credibility has no demand or request for admiration attached, nor does it deserve any; it simply is. The author was a junkie who played in a punk band. What came after, however, might spark respect in even the most high-minded, blue-nosed reader.

Albert's slow (and, it's worth noting) ongoing redemption began on the heels of that solitary, smack-filled, post-show reverie, when he had the presence of mind, coupled with a well-founded fear of jail time, to get himself into rehab. He stayed at Impact House, a hard-nosed joint founded by bikers, for 18 months and got clean. "Sometimes," he writes, with a winning mix of pride, embarrassment and something like wonder, "troubled, petulant kids just need to grow up, no matter what stage of life they believe they're in."

The route that Albert took back to his early love of baseball, meanwhile, started after he'd been clean for a while and a musician friend, Mike, asked him out of the blue -- while he himself was going through withdrawal -- a question that red-blooded American lads have been asking each other for a century or more.

"I noticed Mike's hand trembling as he retrieved a single, bent Marlboro from his pocket ... There was silence as he smoked, punctuated by the sniffing of his constantly running nose. Eventually, Mike looked over at me, wiped his nose with the back of his hand like a little kid, and asked, 'Hey, do you wanna play catch?'"

In short order, a team consisting almost entirely of antisocial misfits is wreaking havoc -- controlled, sanctioned, umpired havoc -- on other, seemingly better prepared, better organized, less 12-step-reliant teams in the local Los Angeles hardball league. No beer-bellied, slow-pitch softball for these guys. Hardball, fast-pitch hardball, is the only way to go.

In quick, highly episodic chapters, Albert introduces the other members of the team, and it is in these characters that so much of the book's heart and its dark, often riotous humor reside. They include:

Chris, a muscular, handsome, cleft-chinned athlete and "skilled street fighter from a family of violent men" with a history of alcohol and drug problems and a predilection for dressing up in women's lingerie and heels. He's the team's catcher.

Johnny, a sweet-natured, romantic recovering addict and active high-stakes gambler who works at an advertising agency, falls hard for strippers and call girls and who spends much of his time, when he's not playing baseball, riding motorcycles and working out with his cousin, the ex-Chili Peppers and Jane's Addiction guitarist and current host of CBS's "Rock Star," Dave Navarro. True to his eclectic nature, he's a solid utility infielder.

Clay, an ex-rocker who grabbed hold of, and then let slip, the brass ring with an almost-huge '80s metal band called Junkyard, ended up living in a broken-down Lincoln Continental for a while, cleaned up (for a while) and played a solid third base for the Pirates. For a while.

Masashi, a Japanese exchange student ostensibly studying acting and English in L.A. but whose primary activities appear to be drinking Budweiser, having sex, going to hardcore rock shows, having sex, thinking about sex, and having more sex. He had a non-speaking role in "The Last Samurai." He pitches.

Dino, another ex-member of another semilegendary punk band, the Hangmen; Don, a parolee who, his teammates eventually learn, once killed a guy, and who thus gets to play pretty much any position he wants; Mike, pitcher and manager, recovering addict, a founder of the late, lamented band Lifter, and the fellow who started it all, in a sense, with his query about playing catch; the West Virginian thespian Jacob, at second base; Jordan, a middle-aged, married, clean-cut baseball fanatic who claims to have invented a very slow pitch, "like an optical illusion," that's essentially unhittable -- he's mistaken about that last part ... and so on.

The really bad news Griffith Park Pirates, indeed. (They settle on the name Pirates in the most logical and democratic manner possible: The Pittsburgh Pirates are the one major league team that no one on the G.P. Pirates hates.)

Albert introduces his friends and teammates in a voice so conversational and engaging that by the time the entire team is assembled and playing -- occasionally losing; occasionally, increasingly, winning -- we've come to know them and like them in the same way that some people, as Hemingway himself once put it, go broke: gradually, and then suddenly. None of them are paragons: Dino has a frightening temper; Jordan and Mike are prima donnas; Clay proves a tough guy to trust. But when they're on the field, or smoking cigarettes in the dugout together when it's their turn to bat, these guys aren't a bunch of misfits at all. They're a team.

A bit more than midway through the book, the Pirates are scheduled to play a winter game in L.A.'s El Sereno Park, but days of rain have turned the field to quicksand. A player on the other team says he knows of another field a few miles off that might be in better shape, and everyone piles into their cars to check it out.

"As I pulled behind the caravan of player's cars," Albert writes, "I wondered when exactly I had joined the human race. You can pass off alienation as a style choice, but at heart, we're social creatures. The reason I'd loved the warmth of narcotics so much was because it made a seemingly inevitable loneliness seem tolerable. I'd stayed in rehab for a year and a half because it was a small world that I felt a part of ... While drugs weren't really an option anymore, isolation was. As I headed over the hill that morning with my friends, I felt grateful to have somewhere to go -- and people to go there with."

In almost any other book, that sentiment might feel either too wan to bear recalling, or too trite to bear voicing. Here, it's an instance of what makes so much of this improbable tale so satisfying: a small, throwaway moment that most of us would likely take for granted, but that "Wrecking Crew" turns into a quiet, hard-won and moving celebration.

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