News from The Opposite Field

In the May issue of Los Angeles magazine I profile Bryan Cranston, the two-time Emmy-winning star of AMC’s Breaking Bad, though better known, perhaps, still as Hal, the hapless dad on Malcolm in the Middle. The premise of the piece, “Heavy Hitter,” was to involve motorcyles. Cranston owns a 2006 Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail, and I was supposed to hop on the back with him and, um, go for a ride. As it happens, the forecast that Sunday was calling for rain, and in the interest of prudence, his people granted me a reprieve.

We still needed to come up with some other activity—that is the rule of an L.A. Mag celebrity “Encounter,” no poking at shrimp cocktails at the Four Seasons—and it was Cranston’s idea for us to meet at the BatCade in Burbank and take some hacks. I am pretty sure he had no idea I was a baseball guy, but he is; Cranston used to coach his daughter’s Little League team, and at 54 he remains a fit athlete.

I found him in the 60 m.p.h. cage already swinging. He looked good: balanced, compact, explosive. I got in some cuts too, of course, but I thought it wise to keep the focus on him—and not just for journalistic reasons. The author was having a hard time seeing the ball.

It was a day I had been looking forward to and a day I had been dreading, the last of the 22 games on Keppel’s 2010 calendar, the finale of Max’s junior season, the beginning of what will soon enough be the end of his high school baseball years. The Aztecs arrived at San Gabriel with a dreadful 2-19 record, exceeded on the misery index only by the Matadors’ 1-18. We had each won a game against the other, and Keppel needed another win to stay out of the Almont League cellar.

Max led things off with a single, and then scored the first run of the game, staking the Aztecs to a 1-0 edge. They gave the run back in the third inning, and let two more slip by in the fourth inning, putting themselves at a 3-1 disadvantage. For a good while, it looked as though that might just be the way the game would end; Max popped up in his second at-bat, and then popped up again in the one after that. In the sixth, though, the Aztecs rallied, evening the score at 3-3, and when Max came up in the final inning with a runner on second, he was itching for redemption.

In the video you can see him fouling off the first pitch. The second one is high. He fouls off another. The next pitch he drills up the middle, driving in the go-ahead (and soon-to-be winning) run. Mark Keppel 4, San Gabriel 3.

As it turns out a reporter from the West Valley Journal, a Monterey Park freebie, was on hand to witness the spectacle, and as soon as it was over, he pulled Max aside—my son’s first postgame interview. Max seemed amused by the attention, even more so by the reporter’s note-taking technique. I will have to wait for Volume 10, Number 9 to be published to see what he said.

Leading off the bottom of the first, Max lets three pitches go by:

1-0. Lay off the junk.

2-0. Low and inside.

2-1. Check swing—that’s not you, baby.

Fourth pitch:

Bam.

Drilled into the right-center gap for a stand-up triple. Two batters later, Max scores. Six innings later, Keppel wins, a 11-4 drubbing of lowly San Gabriel, a team with only one victory this season—over Keppel. The rubber match, the final game of the season, is Friday at San Gabriel.

My writing life has been marked by many an unnatural obsession, stories that lurk at the absurd and occasionally putrid margins of human experience: hoarding, spitting, cockfighting, grease thievery, the Soylent Green-like rendering of euthanized pets into livestock and aquaculture feed. There might be some profound existential underpinnings to it, or maybe not. Maybe I just have an utterly juvenile penchant for gross-out scenes and scatological references. In my early days at the Los Angeles Times, these inclinations led me to keep a file on a phenomenon known as blue ice, which occurs when effluent leaks from an airplane lavatory, freezes on the exterior of the fuselage, then hurtles to the ground like some Jet Age stink bomb. This actually used to happen a lot—maybe still does, I dunno—often enough, at any rate, that I was able to cobble together a “trend” story for the old View section on January 7, 1990. “The first thing that struck Charles Stiegler when he stepped into his Westlake Village home that night last May was the smell, a pungent mix of raw sewage and toilet-bowl cleanser,” it began. The full article is here.

I have been throwing baseballs most of my life—as a kid, as a dad, as a coach, as the commissioner of a Little League that would burn through more than a thousand balls a season—and yet the prospect of standing on the field of a real stadium and tossing out the first pitch to a real baseball player and doing so before a crowd of paying fans, including my parents and my son, well, I would be lying if I said it wasn’t no thang. The game is too special to me, the history and the geometry and the poetry of it too ingrained in my DNA, to go up there and reveal myself as unworthy. So when the Portland Beavers, the team of my childhood, invited me to hurl a ceremonial ball on Mother’s Day, I took a solemn no-YouTube-blooper vow. Max and I travelled to Portland with our gloves, and on Saturday afternoon, and again on Sunday morning, went outside to shake off the rust, of which, at least on my end, there was plenty. I had muscles to unknot and mechanics to iron out and, with each pitch I sent skidding into the pavement, mental blocks to overcome. After a champagne brunch at the 97-year-old Benson Hotel, we headed to PGE Park, where we were greeted by team owner Henry Merritt Paulson III, son of the former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. Out on the grass, under the sun, with my mom at my side and No. 00 Lucky Beaver calling balls and strikes, I experienced some out-of-body sensations. Colors were blurring, my arm starting to turn gelatinous. The video, I think, speaks for itself. My pitch could have been better, much better, but it also could have been worse, oh so much worse.

On Friday the Aztecs faced the same quality team they did on Tuesday, except this time there was nothing righteous about the way they played. Overmatched from the first pitch, our boys were mercied after five innings by a very unmerciful score of 18-0. Which was the real Mark Keppel? I would hate to even speculate.

Max struck out looking his first time up. In the third inning he looped a goofy pop-up into the Bermuda Triangle of first base, second base, and right field. It should have been caught but it was not—nobody even touched it—giving him Keppel’s only base hit of the game. Not a great day at the plate, and yet by going 1 for 2, Max actually raised his average. With two games left in the season, he is batting .424, good most likely for fifth or sixth on the Almont League leader board once all the numbers get updated.

Mark Keppel played a righteous game today against a quality team. Yes, the Aztecs are tied for the cellar in the Almont League with a 1-17 record—and, lamentably, just three more to go. But they are no longer laughingstocks, not merely stat-boosters for their opponents to fatten up on. The video shows Max’s second at-bat of the game. It was the fourth inning, and the Aztecs, hitless at that point, were down 4-0 to Montebello. He looks at a nasty slider for strike one. He flails at another for strike two. He keeps battling, though, seeing five more pitches before he goes the opposite way, drilling a liner over the second baseman’s head. The no-hitter is busted up. Max steals second and a moment later scores. I love that mixture of patience and determination, selectivity and undauntedness. There are a million reasons to get anxious or discouraged. He is batting .421 because he refuses.

On Tuesday, we played our first and only game of the season at Alhambra High School, alma mater of Hall of Fame slugger Ralph Kiner. Born in the tiny coal-mining town of Santa Rita, New Mexico, Kiner moved to Alhambra when he was four, after the death of his father, a steam-shovel operator, and was raised here, alone by his mother, who found work as an insurance company nurse. He signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1940, the year he graduated from high school, and soon emerged as the most prolific home-run hitter of the post-World War II era. He led the Major Leagues in homers six consecutive seasons, twice breaking the hallowed 50 mark. When he retired in 1955, he had a career total of 369, good at the time for sixth in the record books (now 68th). At 87, Kiner is still active as a broadcaster, doing commentary for the New York Mets.

Nobody at Alhambra today is likely to be headed to Cooperstown—and nobody is named Kiner (more like Saldate, Beltran, Crespo, Solis, and Marin)—but the team still plays nearly flawless baseball. They are fivepeat champions of the Almont League, and at 9-1 so far this season, they are close to clinching a sixth.

One of the more hilarious identity crises—er, juxtapositions—of the Kit Rachlis era at Los Angeles magazine manifested itself in the June 2004 “New Downtown” issue. The cover featured a photo of a bougie white couple (both models) in their bleached IKEAesque loft, pretending to be snug, merry pioneers in the city’s rapidly gentrifying core. There was a profile of the developer who started the whole loft renaissance, and a list of downtown’s best restaurants and happy hours. “Where To Live, Shop, Dine & Play!” the cover lines promised.

Nowhere on the exterior of the magazine was there any indication that, lurking inside, was a 6,500-word journey through the tawdry netherworld of a homeless encampment under the Sixth Street Bridge—a piece that read more like a lament about the “New Downtown” than a celebration. As was often the case during my Los Angeles years, though, that was my assignment, to probe the grayer shades, the darker margins, of whatever the official narrative happened to be. For weeks that spring, I explored the labyrinth of nooks and coves that house the homeless on the Los Angeles River—the storm drains, the grottoes, the rafters, the catacombs—discovering in the hive of pimps and pushers and fugitives and freaks something that approached community.

“Under the Bridge,” which can be read here in its entirety, was illustrated with half a dozen haunting black-and-white photos by the late James Fee, including the shot above of Seven, a transvestite prostitute who insisted I bring Chips Ahoy! to our interviews—because he was, well, “a chocolate lover.” Much to some advertiser’s horror, I am sure, the story segued into the magazine’s summer fashion spread, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” which featured yet more primped and coiffed models in “hip-hitting capris, crisp corset styles, and tiers of silk chiffon.”