Diamonds In The Rough

"Mom!" yelled Deangelo, louder and longer this time. He hated this part, the journey along the narrow sidewalk past the Cobra sentinels and their ominously big Georgetown Starter jackets, through the concrete doorways painted with five-pointed stars and other gang symbols, up the long, unlit stairwell and down the hallway to the welcoming light of home. When he rounded that last dark corner, he had to be sure that somebody was waiting to fling open the door. "Mom!"

A light flicked on, a familiar head peered out. "Come on up, Honey," a voice said. "Run!"

One of the boys in the backseat mustered his courage and raised his head. "You going to be all right, Deangelo?" he asked. Deangelo took one look at his mother, one look at his coach and disappeared through the darkened doorway.

If the league does endure, its official birthday will most likely commemorate the August night in 1990 when a 33-year-old insurance broker named Bob Muzikowski happened by Carson Field and struck up a conversation with Al Carter, who was trying single-handedly to run a baseball league there. And not with great success, as Muzikowski found out.

"They had no uniforms, no schedule, no rosters, and the field was in terrible shape," Muzikowski says. "I asked Al if he needed some help."

The two struck a simple bargain: Muzikowski would provide the sponsors and the coaches if Carter would provide the kids. Carter held back at first. "I didn't really buy any of what Bob was saying," says Carter. "It sounded good—but I didn't depend on him to come back."

With good reason. Carter, a 50-year-old Cabrini native, former radio talk-show host, Army veteran and former manager of the city's antigang program, had been running unofficial Cabrini youth programs for more than 16 years. When he met Muzikowski, Carter was splitting his time between work, running the youth foundation and setting up neighborhood Olympics, basketball tournaments and other events. His leagues were makeshift in every sense of the word. For his first track meet, Carter poured out a five-pound bag of flour to trace a 260-yard oval and awarded three pennies for first place, two pennies for second and one penny for third. But the leagues were all the neighborhood had, and Carter had been around long enough to see a lot of energetic, well-meaning white people come into Cabrini-Green, become overwhelmed and leave. Even after Muzikowski rounded up a handful of potential coaches and sponsors for a meeting, Carter remained unimpressed.

"Sure, a lot of coaches showed up, but a lot of them came for the glamour," says Carter. "People look at it as if white America is the savior of all our problems. With them, there'll be no more fighting, no more shooting, no more problems at all. Besides, [coaching] is a nice way to get a halo from your CEO back downtown."

"Al was a hard case at first," says Muzikowski. "But once he saw that we were serious, he was great." He pauses, then adds, "Well, pretty great."

Over the course of that first summer, each side had a lot to learn. Carter, who was named league president, and Patricia Hill, a Chicago police officer and former Cabrini-Green neighborhood organizer, instructed the coaches on how to adapt the game to a gang-controlled area. Carter and Hill explained that players shouldn't raise their first and last fingers in the common "two-out" signal, lest it be mistaken for a Vice Lord hand sign, and that they should substitute the peace sign instead. Uniforms were chosen in gang-neutral colors: robin's-egg blue, maroon, forest green. Team names, at Carter's suggestion, were inspired by those of African tribes, spawning some unlikely combinations: the Morgan Stanley Mail Mau, the First Chicago Near North Kikuyu, the Northwestern Mutual Life Pygmy. Weekly "self-awareness" classes, in which Hill taught the players about African history, were made mandatory. Coaches also had to learn to be on the alert for signs of possible gang involvement—tattoos, colors, hand signs and earrings—as well as to accept the fact that a sweet-faced nine-year-old second baseman could belong to the Vice Lords or the Cobras.