E-Mail This Article to a Friend PUNK-ROCK BASEBALL In Wrecking Crew, the drugs aren’t performance-enhancing BY MIKE MILIARD

Few clichés are more played-out than the transcendent-redemptive baseball story. The Natural. Field of Dreams. The 2004 Boston Red Sox. It’s more old-hat than the one in Trot Nixon’s back pocket.

But Los Angeles writer John Albert has done it: he’s written a true story about hardball salvation that’s neither treacly nor sickly sweet. It’s the opposite, in fact, a pull-no-punches parable about a group of hard-luck, hard-drugged misfits from LA’s underbelly who form an amateur baseball team and, to their own surprise, are changed irrevocably by it.

In Wrecking Crew: The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates (Scribner), Albert, a former drummer for Bad Religion and founding member of goth godfathers Christian Death, expands on an article he penned for LA Weekly about the Pirates, a ragtag starting nine comprised of punks and junkies, out-of-work actors, failed screenwriters, a compulsive gambler, a crossdresser and a convicted murderer. Unlike the aging jocks and beer-bellied suburbanites who typify weekend leagues, most of these tattooed outcasts with bad livers and broken hearts had no real affinity for baseball, save for some lingering memories of a vanished youth. In fact, it was anathema to most of them.

When his friend first floated the idea of a team seven years ago, Albert himself, a recovering addict with no money or direction, certainly felt the same way. "The whole idea that baseball was America’s game, and it represented something wholesome and perhaps conservative, was not attractive to me at all," he says over the phone from LA. "But it does represent, I suppose, a sort of innocent quality that a lot of us had been in a real hurry to get away from."

And for a group of guys trying to escape the darker, more destructive corners of their lives, it made a perverse sort of sense. "At the time, that was completely unacceptable in the subculture and the world we were living in. Everything was ironic and cynical. The most subversive thing we could do was embrace something that was heartfelt and sincere."

At first, it was enough just being outside, exercising a little, experiencing camaraderie. But then the Pirates, a team that at first made the ’62 Mets look like world-beaters, actually started to win a little. "The opposing teams had come to symbolize myriad past foes," Albert writes. "They were ignorant jocks, cops, bosses, nightclub bouncers, and fathers. What we were seeking could have been considered a rather sentimental and symbolic version of that most intoxicating of desires — revenge."

Suddenly, these guys, who in many cases had "bottomed out in a really severe way," were flush with victory. "We hadn’t experienced that sort of feeling of success in a long time in any area of our lives," says Albert. "It was like a drug. And once we got a taste of it, we were obsessed with getting more."

The team still exists, and Albert plays every weekend. Unfortunately, he says, "we haven’t won a single game all year. We’re not even coming close this year, we’re losing by, like, 15 runs." No matter. "In a way, it’s enough to be out there playing and just joking around with our friends. It would be nice to win, sure, but it just doesn’t matter in the same way." This, despite the fact that sunny LA "exaggerates people’s sense of failure. In Los Angeles, if you don’t have everything you sort of have nothing."

A lifelong Angeleno, Albert roots for the blue-and-white. "We’re all Dodger fans and experience all the shame that goes with that recently." But last fall, he and his buddies were transfixed as another team of freaks and weirdoes finally vanquished their fascistic foes. "That was quite spectacular. We were all caught up in that too," he says. "Whether you love the Red Sox or not, everyone hates the Yankees."