Busters At Bat

By John Skow

H---tw-----g is a loathsome and disgusting word, not suitable for a family journal, and it will not be used here. But Daniel Coyle's narrative of a Little League season in Chicago's most notoriously septic housing project does make the reader feel, briefly, that the odds on the human race are no worse than 3 to 2 against.

Hard Ball: A Season in the Projects (Putnam; 317 pages; $22.95) tells the true story of an enterprise so hopeless and ridiculous that it bursts through the limits of ordinary absurdity and emerges, grinning like a fool, on the other side. A bunch of white yuppies, as Coyle tells it, decide to help out with a Little League that's getting started in darkest Cabrini-Green. Cabrini is a 70-acre failed social experiment known, in understated terms, as the worst low-rent development in the U.S. From its high-rises rifle fire sweeps down, both random and specific, as rival gangs contest territory and drug- marketing turf. In Cabrini, as Coyle relates, "gunfire is discussed like weather. Better go shopping early, because they're gonna shoot tonight. They sure were shooting last night, weren't they? They was shootin' early this morning, but then it let up . . ." The annual homicide count, as Coyle notes, regularly exceeds that of several states.

Hell with that. Gonna be a Little League in Cabrini. A tough, prickly black community worker named Al Carter gets it started, in tense alliance with an enthusiastic but overly religious white insurance man named Bob Muzikowski. The very white downtown corporations are persuaded to do the right thing, and since team names are to be those of African tribes, by mad and wondrous logic there are the Northwestern Mutual Life Pygmies, the Northern Trust Maasai, the Morgan Stanley & Co. Mau Maus and the First Chicago Near North Kikuyus.

Coyle's narrative follows the Kikuyus, an endearing collection of woofers, goofers, complainers, excusemakers, big talkers, strike-out artists and wavers at fly balls. They are a fairly normal group of eight-to-12-year-olds, except for a higher than average incidence of male relatives dead or in jail, and except for their conversation. After one girl gangster shoots at another but misses, a gentle 10-year-old Kikuyu says, "I think I heard the bullet. It go fooooosh, right past my head." His buddy scoffs, "What, you never seen nobody do no shootin' before? Man, I seen that mess every day."

True enough, or close. But the kids want to play baseball. When Brad, one of the white coaches, arrives at their field early in the season, "most of the Kikuyus were already there, loosening up their arms by tossing rocks at the El train." A two-level pecking order develops; there are the Busters, who are physically hopeless, and the Home-Run Hitters, who are prima donnas. As the summer swelters on, a couple of the Busters have growth spurts and become Home-Run Hitters. The Kikuyus win some games and even learn to execute the cutoff play. They earn a little pride and frequent slices of pizza (coachly bribes for good behavior).

Coyle, a senior editor at Outside magazine, shrewdly focuses most of his attention on the kids, not the coaches. He tells his story without moralizing or cynicism, and doesn't pretend that a summer of baseball solved anything. In the end, after a team party at a coach's apartment, the kids get into cars for the drive back to Cabrini, which is still a war zone. This is not the moment for uplifting oratory, and Coyle doesn't spout any. But he does offer a gentle visual image that could be taken for hope: as the cars pull away from the curb, "a dozen small hands could be seen sticking out of the windows, trying to capture the air."