Salvation’s first inning

In a town overburdened with recovery tales and treacly talk show testimonials, John Albert’s new memoir, “Wrecking Crew,� is a bawdy tell-all with a deftly executed change-up: It’s a frank first-person account of a group of local ex-punks, addicts, graying rockers, party boys, nihilists and not-so-garden-variety ne’er-do-wells who get saved -- by baseball.

Playing against type, Albert’s tattooed rogue crew, the aptly dubbed Griffith Park Pirates, is not your loosely assembled bunch of fair-weather, once-in-a-blue-moon players but a real city league amateur hardball team with real championship aspirations.

Baseball, Albert would be the first to say, might seem an unlikely pastime for a crew of drug-vexed nocturnal creatures. “Baseball is a pretty conservative world,� says Albert, who has done his time testing boundaries. (Before “finding baseball,� he was a founding member of the cross-dressing band Christian Death and briefly played drums with Bad Religion.) “You’d get thrown off for having the wrong friends, your hair too long. I didn’t like that world. I didn’t like people who played sports. I didn’t like the coaches. They represented everything I was against.�

Growing up in the Inland Empire, Albert says that, albeit from afar, he was more into the Dogtown scene -- the Venice/Santa Monica movement that shaped hard-core skateboard culture and spawned a generation of athletes as antiheroes embodied by skate punk Tony Alva. Back then, in the late ‘70s, says Albert, “All I was interested in was listening to music, skateboarding and smoking huge amounts of pot.�

But before all that, “as a kid, I was a member of the Dodger-Pepsi Fan Club,� he admits, not sheepishly, over a lunch plate of crepes and over-easy eggs at a new, sort of Frenchified, shabby chic Silver Lake bistro. “You’d turn in your Pepsi bottles and you’d get a shirt and a ticket to a game. I’d go with my dad. It was part of growing up in Los Angeles, and I liked it,� he says. “But then I became a 15-year-old punk rocker.�

But like this upscale restaurant on a still run-down-at-the-edges block, things evolve in their own time. “I was always a very isolated, slightly agoraphobic person growing up,� says Albert. “Now I have all these people, this network of friends ... not a fraternity really, but more like being in a lodge -- like on ‘The Flintstones.’ �

If you grew up in Southern California, there is something about Albert that will feel familiar. Not because you know his face but you know his ilk, his vibe: the restlessness in the wide-open space, the gaze set toward some unspecified elsewhere -- searching for something else. At the very least, the nearest exit.

Writing a paean to baseball seemed the furthest thing from his mind. “I didn’t really have a concept that it meant anything,� says Albert, 40. It was a lark, something subversive or ironic, and he found himself struggling with ambivalence.

“Initially I was attracted to the strangeness of the whole endeavor,� he writes in one of the early chapters. “For someone like me, an anti-social intellectual who had spent his life sneering at any kind of middle-class normalcy, joining a baseball team felt oddly subversive.� Eventually the rituals, the work, the camaraderie became something he and this de facto team grew to enjoy -- even crave. “It was, you plug one hole and another one opens up,� he says.

In the beginning, however, the Pirates were -- bluntly -- a travesty. Albert writes of their first field foray in 1998 as they readied for their first season:

Most of [the team was] dressed in old T-shirts and worn sneakers, like they were going to snatch purses.... Balls bounced out of gloves, people started to run, and then abruptly tripped or simply shrieked in agony and limped away. We weren’t bad baseball players. The reality was we weren’t baseball players at all.... By the time Jordan [the team’s co-manager] finally waved us in no one was talking. It wasn’t because we were shy or embarrassed. Rather, it was because most of us were gasping for air and trying not to vomit.

But sports, as Albert points out, are rarely just games. The contest often becomes a metaphor for something else, sometimes something unacknowledged -- even to oneself. So no one was more shocked than they were when the Pirates started to win their games, even more so when this sore, battered, Tylenol-eating team walked away with the championship in 1999.

Sentimental tales

THE team’s story first appeared as a feature in L.A. Weekly about five years ago, not long after Albert, who is a freelance writer, had begun sharing anecdotes about his idiosyncratic crew with a couple of editors at the paper. “The one thing that I was most concerned about was whether my friends were going to like it. I was really worried that they would read it and think that it was too sentimental.�

Hardly. Like the article, the book is a picaresque journey tailing a nearly depleted band of rogues, rockers and transplanted Hollywood-actor hopefuls just crossing the threshold into midlife. It’s about missed moments, botched opportunities, life stuck in neutral -- or worse, reverse -- with a backdrop of Los Angeles as an illusory paradise fueling alienation.

“To understand it,� writes Albert, “you needed to look below the surface and see the profound emptiness of the place. If you gazed at all of the identical cookie-cutter homes, then you would see the paint chipping and many of the swimming pools were now filled with rainwater and garbage. Like a sun-drenched ‘Lord of the Flies.’ � What he found as he pressed further was a pattern to the players’ lives -- that so many of these hard-core iconoclasts and DIY-ers had once flirted with the sport or had aspirations. “It seemed that for everyone, the moment that their lives veered off track was often at the very same time they were thrown off their baseball teams, or were told they could no longer play.�

Like his baseball brethren, Albert sparred with his own demons -- aimlessness, isolation, narcotics-fueled legal problems and viral hepatitis, a condition he contracted as a teenager using dirty syringes and straining his drugs through discarded cigarette filters.

“I was putting so much personal, slightly embarrassing stuff in� about his friends -- their prodigious drug use, sexual dalliances, obsessive gambling and cross-dressing activities -- “that periodically I would have to put something about myself in there. But I would ask them, ‘Do you really want to use your real name?’ But it’s the post-Jerry Springer thing: ‘Dude, you have to use my real name.’ �

Albert’s bald revelations and unblinking eye struck a chord. “When the article came out, all of a sudden the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. The irony was that before all this I was struggling with writing screenplays, and, like, they were just ending up as doorstops and paperweights. Now I had some work. Got an agent. The story was optioned. I got the book deal,� he says, still looking stunned.

Turning the article into a book was a bit more challenging. “I wrote the article, and this is a really pretentious way of putting it, but it was sort of like poetry, where it is just an impression,� says Albert. “I would just put on loud music and drink coffee and write -- even get teary-eyed. It was easier to sustain the mood. But writing the book, I had to think about our place in the world. Growing up. Addiction. It forced me to actually think about L.A. as a city and a culture more. I saw the big picture -- the connections.�

What he also helped to do was clarify the team’s collective motivation and its evolution. At first, Albert says, winning was about squaring things with myriad past foes -- “ignorant jocks, cops, bosses, nightclub bouncers, fathers.� Later it was about something else: “obsession,� he says without hesitation. “Once we won a little, it just felt good.�

For a ragtag group that had spent a lifetime checking out in one way or another, just acknowledging something as ephemeral as a moment in the sun was nothing short of a miracle. “In the beginning we had a lot of people who said, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ll play.’ They thought it was ironic,� says Mike Coulter, one of the prime architects of the whole endeavor. “But as we got closer to starting the season, a lot of people’s backs started hurting mysteriously.... What it boiled down to was people didn’t want to lose. The people who stayed weren’t afraid to fail.�

Moment of transformation

ALBERT is not offering magic or easy antidotes. Some of his teammates remain at odds with their past. “That team was a moment,� says Albert, who still plays with some of the original crew in the Pirates’ current incarnation. “This team now has a different character. Now we’re just out there to have fun. We probably only had one good season,� he says, not unhappily. “But at that moment we didn’t have careers, we didn’t have girlfriends. Just baseball.�

And one another. “It wasn’t just the baseball. It was the guys,� says Chris Casey, who was an all-star player in his teens and is still, at 30, a formidable athlete. “But then I really got into drugs for about five years, and then baseball was out of the question.� That was until he got clean and serendipitously happened upon Coulter and the team. “Here were a bunch of guys bonding for a common goal but with similar liabilities.� Though the team was still a comedy of errors, “I was trying to practice the principles of sobriety. I had an open mind and patience ... and I couldn’t be choosy,� he explains. “I’ve been asked by other divisions higher than us to play with them. I tell them, ‘Nah, man, I’m a Pirate.’ �

Albert’s own life is very different now. He’s married and owns two dogs and a house just a short walk away. Though he’d been clean long before his time on the Pirates, he takes nothing for granted. “I don’t think I’ll ever use heroin again. I know in one month I’d be broke; in two I’d be in jail. But there is still that attraction, that jealousy when you watch someone else check out.�

It’s recovery’s uncertain waters. But there’s an indelible image he can flip to: “We went to eat after a game, and it was sort of a big group, and we were still wearing our hats. And I remember thinking there was just this feeling of belonging. It was a beautiful day, and I was really grateful to be here with my friends, and I’m relatively healthy.

“There’s a certain innocence to playing baseball. It reminded me of being a kid, and I never thought I would feel that way again. Never thought we’d reach this age.�