Jesse Katz and Ressurecting an LA Field of Dreams

Saturday night, my pal Jesse Katz had a book reading at Vroman’s in Pasadena, for his newly released memoir, The Opposite Field.

Jesse is a former LA Times gang reporter, two-time Pulitzer winner and, up-until-recently, an LA Magazine feature writer. He is also an insightful cultural analyst and a prose stylist of elegance and great grace.

All 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,LLa Loma field in Monterey Park.

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. 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. 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.

Writer/cultural critic D.J. Waldie has reviewed the book for TruthDig and his take is pitch perfect.

“‘The Opposite Field,'” writes Waldie, “is a lot like Los Angeles. It’s about desire and its consequences, some of them awful.”

Exactly. And here is more from Waldie.

The Monterey Park Sports Club needed rules when Max [Jesse’s son] signed up for T-ball and Katz became the volunteer coach of his team. 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. 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.

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. He is everyone’s rabbi. In season and out, Katz remains a believer in parks-and-rec baseball, the return of spring, and tradition. 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. “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. 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.”

Far be it for me to tell you what you ought to be reading. 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.