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"FacebookPinterest\n\nWhen you leave the baseball fields at Pyne Poynt Park in Camden, New Jersey, you can stroll two blocks south or one block west, and there, under a power line hung with sneakers, or here, next to a giant stuffed tiger tied to a telephone pole, you can most definitely buy dope and maybe powdered or crack cocaine, though that's not the flavor of the month, hasn't been for a decade. You could walk another few blocks and buy prescription drugs or weed. It's all right out in the open, nothing shy or taboo about it. Just the glassy-eyed tiger looking a bit rain-scraggy but also slightly menacing, and the roads are potholed and cracked, unlike those in Cherry Hill or Mount Laurel or any of the surrounding suburbs where most of the buyers live. Those customers usually grab what they need and get the hell out, but some get waylaid, dope-snagged, hook, line, and sinker, and move into one of the tent cities that have mushroomed along the edge of the neighborhood. The homeless addicts sport farmer's tans and use the neighborhood parks as shooting galleries. And the children of North Camden\u2014a ten-by-twelve-block neighborhood, bounded by rivers on three sides and on the fourth by a freeway\u2014have their own ghost stories to tell: We seen this dope fiend on the bridge making noises, going cack, cack, cack! and I yelled to my friend: Run, Ronald, run, the fiend's gonna get you!\n\n Murder Rate in Camden: 86 per 100,000\n\n Murder Rate Nationally: 5 per 100,000\n\nHere, on the tiger's block, you'll come to the spot where a 24-year-old was gunned down last May, a newbie to the drug trade. That's why he was killed, people say: He just hadn't learned the ropes. Walk a bit farther west and you'll come to the John Wesley apartments, where the paved courtyard is almost always filled with kids in the warm weather and where two men were shot on June 3, one taking eight bullets but surviving. People say it was his fat that saved him; he was a big man.\n\nThree years ago, Camden ranked as one of the poorest cities in the country and the single deadliest, with a murder rate twelve times the national average. That was also the year that Camden, faced with a mounting deficit, decided to lay off almost half its police force. Ah shit, everyone was thinking, this is when all bloody hell breaks loose. Some drug dealers printed up T-shirts proclaiming January 2011: It's Our Time.\n\nAnd Bryan Morton? He had an idea: \"Let's start a Little League.\"\n\nForty-two years old, thin in a springy, muscly sort of way, with a giant smile, a jutting chin, and light-color eyes, Bryan's not only the founder and president of the North Camden Little League, he coaches two of the teams. His 4-year-old daughter plays on his T-ball team, his 10-year-old son on the minor league Yankees. Last April he began registering kids for the league's third season at Northgate Park, where there's a playground and a sculptural fountain that used to work until some desperate junkie stole the copper piping.\n\nWhen I meet up with Bryan, he's already negotiated an agreement with the dealers who normally post up inside the park. They're pacing the sidewalk just outside, and one of the crew, a very tall, supple man called Treetop, starts mugging for me, tiptoeing by the entranceway like a bad kid who just got a time-out, his index finger to his lips: Shhhhh...\n\n\"His mother didn't give him enough hugs,\" Bryan says with a laugh like a sharp bark.\n\nAs soon as the dealers had sauntered out of the park (they didn't want to look too accommodating) and Bryan set up his folding table, arranging the sign-up sheets in a neat pile, children began to stream in through the gates, on bicycles, scooters, running on sneakered feet. Word had gone out: The park was safe. It was like watching spring bloom in a minute.\n\nWhen an addict tries to enter the park, Bryan blocks his path. \"The park is for kids and their families today,\" Bryan says. The man looks flummod. \"Where am I supposed to go?\" There's absolutely no light in Bryan's eyes when he says, \"Not my problem.\" What incenses Bryan is that the children of North Camden are invisible to men like this. They must be, because how else could these junkies decide, again and again, that it's okay to shoot up in front of 5-year-olds on slides, toddlers plucking at the grass?\n\n\"Whaddup, my man?\" Bryan asks a small boy standing shyly with his mother. \"You ready to play some ball this summer?\" It's only $25 to join the league, and for that each player gets a practice uniform and a game uniform, cleats, a glove if he needs one, and a trophy at the end of the season. \"Our kids already have two strikes against them,\" Bryan says. \"They come from Camden, and they come from North Camden. But they will never look like they're not competitors.\" He manages this with the help of the Philadelphia Phillies RBI program and a generous private donor who buys all the game uniforms. By registration's end, he has 200 kids signed up and twenty-nine volunteer coaches.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nFor Bryan, baseball is a multipurpose tool: It can unify the neighborhood, and it pits the diamond against the corner. Since the dealers recruit kids at about the same age as the coaches do, Bryan's in a tug-of-war for the souls of these 12-year-olds, some of whose parents are out there slinging, too. \"Look,\" Bryan says, \"we can all agree on children, you know? That they should be free to be kids. And if Dad or Mom is at a game for a few hours a week, they're not hustling. They're at a game.\"\n\nBryan's philosophy in a nutshell: Don't let circumstances dictate your behavior. Reverse that dynamic. Fill the parks with kids and families and eventually the junkies and the dealers will drift away. Pretend that you live in a safe place and maybe it will become one.\n\n\n\nDowntown camden is deserted. Saturday morning, June 22\u2014opening day\u2014and the North Camden Little League has gathered for a parade from City Hall to Pyne Poynt Park. Coaches, parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and a couple of hundred players, looking sharp in their new uniforms, fall in behind the Camden High School marching band and, led by some high-stepping, poker-faced majorettes, take off down Market Street.\n\nAs the parade crosses the freeway that separates North Camden from the rest of the city, people spill out onto their front porches to watch, the old men nodding their heads in some secret, silent satisfaction. Meanwhile the dealers who would usually be trolling the edges of the street, ready to step to the window of any car that slows or stops, are standing on the sidewalk today (looking sharp themselves in their Jordans and crisp white T-shirts), simply waiting us out.\n\nMillie Delgado is sweating as she tramps back and forth between her kids' teams, first walking alongside her 6-year-old T-baller, Serenity, and then plunging back to march with her 8-year-old son, Makhi, and yelling herself hoarse: \"Let's go, Pirates!\" Makhi, round and buttery looking, marches along in his yellow Pirates uniform, beaming to bursting, a Buddha ball of suffused and suffusing joy. Millie's got sharp little teeth, faded blue tattoos, a baby-girl voice, and a bruised look in her eyes. She's got a thousand regrets for the things she did when she was young\u2014\"They raised us like animals. We were taught it was okay to fight people, okay to hurt people\"\u2014and another thousand fears of what North Camden can do to a sunny, loving boy like Makhi. But for now, here in this happy crowd, she can take a rest from her worries.\n\nBryan strides alongside the parade, sometimes up front with the T-ballers, sometimes in the back with the teenagers in the major and minor league teams. A big grin sharpens his chin as the parade rolls through the streets like a fever dream, trumpets and saxophones glinting in the sun, kids and coaches shouting the names of their teams, parents playing traffic cop (there's no police escort today, though Bryan requested one), a grandma on a megaphone, a man woofwoofing like a dog.\n\nWhen Bryan was growing up in the '80s and '90s, all of the local industries that had made Camden prosperous\u2014New York Shipbuilding, Campbell's Soup, RCA/Victor\u2014were either long gone or on their way out. The mom-and-pop stores, the barbershops, and the social clubs that dotted the hood were disappearing fast; street gangs rose in their place. Unable to sell their homes, many residents just up and fled. \"The jobs left, cocaine came in, and every able-bodied man was hustling,\" Bryan remembers. He himself was running the streets at 13. A teenager selling powdered cocaine and $5 bags of crack. When he started smoking it himself, the fate of many a dealer, he tumbled down a long way, losing friends and family, scuttling blindly after the next hit and the next until he was robbing people to support his habit. At 21 he was arrested for armed robbery, his weapon a finger or a mini liquor bottle poked in the backs of his victims. He was 29 when he got out of prison. Brick by brick, he began to build his new life: a job, a college course, a second part-time job, more college courses, a third part-time job... Now he's a married father of three, working toward his master's in public administration and living with his family in the house on State Street where his grandma raised him.\n\n Supermarkets in Camden: 2\n\n Open-Air Drug Markets: 175\n\nThe sun is directly overhead when the marchers roll into Pyne Poynt, where the coaches have been at it since 9 a.m., dragging the infield with a piece of fencing tied to the back of a car, chalking out the baselines. Every Saturday during the season, they arrive early to prepare the field. When it rains it floods, and a small pond, which would comfortably float a duck or two, opens up between home and first. The coaches push the water out using the blunt side of a landscape rake. When it's really bad, they pour gasoline in the puddles and set them on fire.\n\nThe band now marches in place. The mayor, Dana Redd (whose parents were found shot to death in a motel room when she was 8), arrives to throw the opening pitch to a T-baller and then fist-bumps him, to the delight of the crowd. And a city councilman, Brian Coleman, talks to me about how so many men have been stripped from the community\u2014they're in prison; they're dead\u2014that Camden has become a matriarchy, a fatherless place, and how significant it is, then, that Bryan and all these male coaches are stepping into that void.\n\n\n\nBy the time the mayor threw that first pitch, all of the teams had been practicing for more than a month. One evening in May, the light lingering, Bryan had called me to proudly announce, \"We covered the hood. Baseball is being played on every field in North Camden tonight.\" Dope City was alive with the sounds of bats cracking balls, runners tearing toward second, third, shouts!, bodies thudding, sliding across home plate. They were playing at Pyne Poynt. On the Rutgers-Camden diamond. On the rutted field at Tenth Street Park, which some people refer to as Samalica Ortiz Park, after the 11-year-old first baseman for Las Mu&amp;amp;#xF1;ecas, a girls' softball team, who was shot and killed in 1993. And T-ballers were running the bases over at Dominick Andujar Park, named for one of their former teammates, a 6-year-old who was murdered in September 2012 as he tried to defend his 12-year-old sister from a knife-wielding attacker in their home. (The guy was high on \"wet,\" PCP-soaked marijuana.) There's no plaque to mark his death, no city effort to keep the park a fitting memorial or even a good place to play ball.\n\nBack at Pyne Poynt on opening day, the minor league Phillies are preparing to take on the Pirates. It's the North Camden Little League's only real rivalry, more heated than high-spirited, between head coach Julio Ruiz and head coach Frankie Rosado, two men as unalike as midnight and high noon. Frankie's a calm, taciturn presence. He's played ball almost his entire life. Last year, Frankie's Pirates came to the field like soldiers, disciplined and focused. They had a perfect season and entered the championship round undefeated. They won the first game of the three-game series but lost the next two to Julio's Phillies, who had the smallest, wildest kids on any team but who practiced longer and harder than anyone else. This year, almost all Julio's players are back, a year older, already in sync. Most of Frankie's players aged out of the minor leagues, so he's starting fresh with a number of kids who've never played baseball before. But he has some aces in the hole, like Sedale Nixon, a calm and businesslike 10-year-old built like a fireplug, a home-run slugger and a closing pitcher with nerves of steel, a kid who has been visited by Jackie Robinson in his dreams.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nBy the time the Pirates and Phillies start playing at 4 p.m., the air is a woven basket of sweat, whirring insects, cigarette smoke, and the scent of hot dogs grilling. Lanky Elijah Dorsey is pitching for the Pirates, a job he'd rather not have. Whenever he reaches a full count, he starts smiling out of sheer nervousness. \"No worries, kid,\" Frankie calls out softly to him. \"Remember, it's your world.\" Unaccustomed to baseball etiquette, Millie Delgado, Makhi's mom, is sitting on the bench with the Pirates players. When she starts to lead the kids in a chant of \"Pirates rule! Phillies drool!\" Frankie admonishes her quietly. \"No, we're not doing that,\" he says, and she and the kids stop on a dime.\n\nThe Pirates take an early lead, walking their way to three runs, while the impatient Phillies batters chase every pitch. \"Don't swing at no ugly balls!\" Coach Julio yells at his players. By the third inning, the Phillies have tied the game, and by the bottom of the sixth and final inning, they've opened up a 10&amp;amp;#x2013;3 lead. (In the Pirates huddle, Frankie says, \"Why the long faces? I'm not mad at you. So don't be mad at yourselves.\") Though the Pirates rally for four late runs, the last two batted in by wonder boy Sedale Nixon, it's not enough. Final score: 10&amp;amp;#x2013;7, Phillies.\n\nThe Phillies players come rushing off the field, lapping up against Coach Julio like waves. \"Consider yourself lucky,\" Julio tells them as they stutter to a stop. \"Because you did everything wrong today.\"\n\n\"But we beat 'em! We won!\" one Phillies kid whispers fiercely to another.\n\n\"We didn't win nothin',\" Julio says with heat, and then, seeing their dumbfounded faces, relents a bit. \"A lot of our players did good, but we got a lot of hard work ahead of us.\"\n\n\n\nA road circles through Pyne Poynt, and occasionally an ice cream truck comes lumbering through, chiming its lunatic song, though I never saw a parent buy anything, and by the end of the summer the truck had stopped coming. Early in the morning, junkies shoot up between the screen of bushes and the riverbank. They often leave needles in the porta-potties in the park, smears of blood. One afternoon an ambulance cruises by, the driver asking the kids and coaches if they've seen a body, because someone has called in an overdose. Within days, the body has entered the neighborhood kids' lore. They never found the body, but they found this blood and they tested it, and that's how they know he was murdered!\n\nThe Phillies practice twice as often\u2014four times a week\u2014as any other team. The sessions begin at four thirty and can go on until seven thirty. The kids never seem to get enough. Coach Julio, a.k.a. Juli, believes in repetition and hard work, but he also wants to be out on the field, wants to be around his players.\n\nHe always arrives at the field first, straight from his job at an auto-parts warehouse, driving his black Chevy Impala, the back window an etched memorial to his dead brother, who was struck by a car when he stopped to help a stranded motorist. Eleven-year-old Osvaldo Rios, known to everyone as Tun-Tun, sits in the backseat\u2014ready to pipe in his opinion, his face an ever animated play of merriness, mischief, intelligence, and nerve. Last year Tun-Tun \"was just loose-cannon wild,\" Juli remembers. He would stand in the outfield screaming at the parents of the opposing team, \"Ah, suck my balls! Suck my balls!\" Halfway through the season, Juli asked the veteran Frankie if he had any coaching advice. Frankie told him he was doing a good job, but he added, \"Just remember, your kids' behavior is a reflection on you as a coach.\" That comment bugged Juli all season, even as he started working with Tun-Tun, working on him, haranguing him on the rides home but then buying him a water ice. Little by little that steadfastness paid off until the kid could be counted on to behave on the field, work hard...and hit home runs.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nJuli's temper is close to legendary. When he's really pissed, he snatches the cap from his head, flings it to the ground, and starts jumping up and down, his face gone so darkly thunderous that you think he's going to burst like a balloon and zip off into the sky. \"Heads up! Heads up! This is not a joke! If you play this way on Saturday, the Pirates are gonna smash your face!\" I saw one grandmother break into nervous giggles during one of his tirades, but mostly the Phillies parents just nod in approval. \"You tell 'em, Coach!\" they'll say. The parents love Juli. Their kids don't listen, and Juli makes 'em listen. And he invites them to his house for barbecues and pool parties, even a Halloween party last year, long after the season was over. When a player gets it right, Juli's quick to tell him, \"That's it. That's what I like to see. That's real baseball.\" At the end of the practice, some of the boys are playing shirtless. When they stop for water, they put on a \"gun show\" for Coach Juli, grinning and flexing their little biceps. \"Those look like .22s to me,\" Juli observes with a grin. \"They go pow! pow!\" The kids fall out laughing\u2014they made Coach smile! \"Coach J! Coach J! Can we practice some more?\"\n\nDriving home after practice, past the drug corners, the hard-eyed sellers, the lookout kids twirling lightly on their bicycles, the darkness creeping up walls and bricks and trees toward the faint blueness overhead, assistant coach Danny Calo, a.k.a. Pretty, a bear of a man wedged into the passenger seat, muses aloud, \"Yo, if we had coaches back then like how we are now, it would be a whole different story. We'd never choose the route we went....\" Childhood friends, both men started dealing drugs together when Juli was 14 and Danny was 13. The one person who could've stopped Juli, his father, up and left a couple of years earlier. \"He was the one always showing up to my games and looking at my homework,\" Juli says. Not his mother. \"I would never want to fail around him. But then one day he was gone. He just, poof!\"\n\nWhen Juli dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade, he started working the corner full-time, but he always had his GED workbook with him. Between deals, he sat on the stoop and studied. It went well for a while\u2014he had his own crib at 16, lots of cash, friends, girls. Then he turned 18, and overnight stays at juvie hall turned into twenty months of real jail time. When Juli was 25, his brother died, and all Juli could think was: \"That shoulda been me. I'm the one on the streets running around, acting like I'm Tony Montana.\"\n\nThrough it all, he always loved playing sports. He had that quality he most admires in his players, far more than talent\u2014he calls it \"the dog.\"\n\n\"You can tell when somebody has it,\" he says. \"That means they can't picture themselves losing. I can see you're more athletic than me, but I just can't picture you beating me. It's the dog that won't let me do it.\" When Juli played baseball as a kid, he was such a hothead, so prickly, that he says he would never have been able to coach himself, no fucking way. If Coach Juli screamed and hollered at kid Juli? He would've told him to go fuck himself and stalked off the team. No, Coach Frankie\u2014calm, deliberate, and unflappable\u2014would've been the perfect coach for young Juli, he says, even though he can't stand the guy.\n\n\n\nIt seems to rain every other day in Camden, and always in the late afternoon, a Caribbean weather pattern where the day goes from yolk yellow sunshine and stifling heat to brief, wild downpours, a silver slashing of the air, and then the skies clear and the fields give off steam and the scent of moldering earth. All the kids have mosquito bites on their calves and ankles. All summer long.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nAt Pyne Poynt, Coach Frankie is hitting balls to third base, where the boys are lined up to take their turns catching grounders and firing them to first. Frankie doesn't say much as they field the balls, just good, again, much better, his voice quiet and contained. He has olive eyes and a goatee, a baseball cap shading his face. He never raises his voice, but he has a natural authority, a mystique even. (Other coaches watch the Pirates' practices and copy his drills.) His kids listen gravely to the instructions, and when they ecute and Frankie says drolly, \"See? I think I know what I'm talking about,\" they duck their heads and grin.\n\nSome parents are sitting in their cars, which they've pulled up onto the grass. Sedale Nixon's mom, Tanya, is there, straight from the Children's Hospital in Philly, still in her nurse's scrubs. Before the season started, she tried to get Frankie to guarantee that he would coach her son. She didn't want him coached by that madman Julio. \"You got to promise you'll keep my son up under your wing,\" she told him. \"I don't want him up underneath anyone else.\"\n\nFrankie was raised in the Cramer Hill section of Camden, a relatively safe area of the city where a lot of people still own their homes. \"The 'better' part of Camden, if you can use that term,\" Frankie says. At one point, Frankie wanted to be a police officer, but he ended up becoming a social worker instead. He and his wife, Karen, met in a college class. She was a single mom, working while getting her education and managing to send all three of her kids to private schools. (Now her son Sam plays for the Pirates.) She and Frankie had a baby girl last spring, and they're absolutely determined to give their four kids what they need to succeed. Which is why they moved out of Camden last year and into a new house in Pennsauken, just northeast of the city. \"You know what it's like when you fill out a job application and put your address and it's Camden?\" Frankie asks. \"You fill out a credit card application? You get knocked out of the box just because it's Camden.\" He works two jobs, his full-time one as a case manager at a Volunteers of America program for parolees. Occasionally he talks about switching careers, getting into a technical trade\u2014he likes to work with his hands, and things are easier to fix than people.\n\nOne of his co-workers at the VOA, Joey Polanco, joined the Pirates this season as an assistant coach. Joey is a walloping, pumped-up presence\u2014\"Yo, Frankie! I always wanted to be called 'Coach'! That was, like, my dream!\"\u2014with a head shaved bald and a beard that circles his chin, ear to ear, like a dog's ruff. He's a true child and soldier of the street, having entered the life at 11 years old, having sold drugs, having been shot (twice), having lost his father to a heroin overdose, having spent many years in juvie and adult lockups (\"state college,\" he calls it). Having, finally, grown desperately, deeply tired\u2014\"tie-erd!\"\u2014of hustling, he decided he had to \"stop living in the problem and start living in the solution.\" Which meant finding a job (operating a forklift) and going back to school. For two years he started his day at 2 a.m. and didn't get home till 9 p.m. He was living in the solution, and he was all in.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nAs the season rolls along, the wins pile up for the Pirates and the Phillies (once again the best two teams in their division), but some players disappear. Beaming Makhi is one of them. After yet another shooting at the Wesley apartments, where the family lives, Millie sent him and Serenity to stay with relatives outside the city. She sounds lonely and stressed when I talk to her about it, but she's trying to keep her kids alive and trying to keep them from becoming like her\u2014hard on the outside, but inside? Scared, scarred, and grieving. When two of Bryan's players go AWOL after losing a game, Bryan tracks them down\u2014and finds them standing near a known drug set at ten at night. \"Yo! Y'all some soft, cotton-candy-ass kids. Y'all come up against some toughness, y'all be ready to fold in the pocket.\" \"No, we ain't, Coach B!\" the boys protest. Well, then, show me!\n\n\"I gotta talk dirty to 'em sometimes, 'cause that's what we're used to,\" Bryan tells me. \"It's just this crazy balance, man, you have to strike to be able to maintain street credibility and office officialness.\" Bryan says the toughest kids are the most vulnerable to the street, because those are the kids the dealers favor, the aggressive ones, the smart-asses, the kids with the dog who just can't stand to lose. In spite of his efforts, the two boys never return to the field.\n\nMeanwhile the kids who do stay are having the summer of their lives. Any given practice might be declared \"the best one ever!\" especially if it involves food afterward. As the playoffs approach, the coaches start digging into their own pockets to take their kids to the batting cages in Philly. One sweltering Saturday, after a terrific downpour, five of Frankie's Pirates insist on coming to the field early to help the coaches dig ditches to drain the field onto the road. Shovels in hand, the three Rivera brothers and the two Perez cousins, ages 8 through 12, work as hard as grown men. Next year the puddles they play through, the porta-potties they avoid, will be a thing of the past. Camden County has signed off on a $3 million transformation of Pyne Poynt\u2014the most ambitious public project in North Camden since the building of Riverfront State Prison in 1985. The park will have brand-new baseball and soccer fields, a drainage system, basketball courts, restrooms, night lights, bleachers, and a concession stand, all of it due in no small part to the persistent presence of Bryan Morton's North Camden Little League.\n\n\n\nIn early August, the Pirates and Phillies play back-to-back games, and they each win one. The tension during any Pirates-Phillies game is elevated, not just because the players and coaches are rivals, but also because the fans can be so cutthroat. A number of the Phillies mothers played softball when they were young, and these women not only know the game, they're deeply competitive. Before games, Juli texts the parents \"Bring on the noise!\" but it hardly seems necessary. Striiiike 'em out!... He don't want to hit that ball!... The Pirates are going dowwwn! Frankie wishes he could stuff his kids' ears with cotton, but to Juli these are the sounds of a good time. During last year's championship, Juli finally stopped worrying about Frankie's comment that his kids were a reflection of him, because, Juli says, \"we looked like we were having twenty times more fun than they were.\"\n\n People Living Below the Poverty Line in Camden: 39 %\n\n People Living Below the Poverty Line Nationally: 15 %\n\nIn the first game, the Phillies' pitching was terrible, and the patient Pirates walked their way to a win. In the second, the Phillies pitched beautifully, the Pirates didn't swing, and the Phillies won big-time. Frankie knows he's got a problem\u2014his kids have stopped hitting, and he can't figure out how to unlock those bats. He dreads a repeat of last year's championship, when his players fizzled out. \"I don't think my team does well under pressure,\" a troubled Frankie says afterward. \"They just fall off the face of the earth. I don't know what to say to motivate them.\"\n\nThe season ends how everyone knew it would: with a rematch of last year's threegame championship series between the Pirates and the Phillies. The first two games will be played at the Tenth Street field, where five-foot weeds shoot up between the splintery wooden bleachers and the outfield is a grass-covered maze of ruts and holes.\n\nArriving at the field on Thursday for game one, I find Bryan there with his big blue truck that looks like it came off an Oklahoma dirt farm. He begins dragging the infield as the Phillies trickle in. One of the mothers spray-paints the players' hair red. She's brought a bag of noisemakers, too, and red shirts for the coaches, reading: all we do is win. Juli sprays Tun-Tun and another boy, but he holds the nozzle too close to their heads, so the paint drips down their foreheads and they look like they've stumbled from a terrible car crash.\n\nAs the Pirates players arrive, neighborhood people drift in and pull their folding chairs up to the backstop. Two middle-aged women sit drinking beer out of paper cups, former softball players reveling in the old sounds. Standing behind them, arms folded across his chest, Bryan's smiling as he listens to them reminisce. They've found only two game balls, and assistant coach Joey shouts, \"We only got two? Let's play with two!\"\n\nIn the Pirates' pregame huddle, Frankie tells his boys, \"Don't make me proud. Don't make anyone else proud. Make yourself proud, and make that player next to you proud. Play for each other, all right?\"\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nThe Pirates are up first, and as leadoff batter Marcus Perez steps to the plate amid a cacophony of bleating horns and whistle blasts from the Phillies side, Joey fires him up: \"Listen, if he wants to waste pitches throwing balls, let him. If it's close, bang it. If it's in the middle, punish it.\" And that's what the Pirates do, erupting for five runs in the first inning and never letting up. The final score is 14&amp;amp;#x2013;1, including a home run by Sedale that sent the Pirates fans into a dancing, cheering frenzy. By the end, after all the screaming has died down, the shock, the disappointment, Juli has to admit that Frankie's team played \"sharp\" today. \"They brang their A game.\" But he has no doubt that the Phillies are coming home with the championship.\n\nAnd on Saturday the Phillies win big: 18&amp;amp;#x2013;8. They smack the Pirates down in the first two innings, scoring eleven runs. The Pirates keep climbing back into the game, proving they aren't the team of last year, they're fighters, but it's to no avail. Afterward, the happy tribe of Phillies heads over to Juli's house. There, Juli's three children and the Phillies kids horse around in the above-ground pool, Danny throws a few of them in, lifting them up as easily as a bag of groceries. As it gets dark, the kids stage a dance-off, the adults cheering and egging them on. Juli's wife, Rebecca, makes chicken wings and sausage and salads, and long after the kids have retired to the house to watch TV, Juli and Danny and one of the dads sit at the picnic table out back, drinking Coronas and shots of Patr&amp;amp;#xF3;n and discussing...baseball.\n\n\n\nThe championship game is on Sunday afternoon, back at Pyne Poynt, and a full crowd is in attendance again. A flock of geese works the outfield; wispy white feathers, looking like dryer fluff, cling to the grass, greenish-black droppings everywhere. Juli and Danny prep the fied, raking it smooth and then lining the bases.\n\nMeanwhile, Frankie sits on a bucket of balls, watching. This enrages the Phillies parents. They get angrier and angrier, shouting, \"We're voting our coach 'Coach of the Year'! He brings the kids swimming, he fis the field! He's like a mini-dad! How come none of their coaches are helping?\" Last year, Frankie did most of the field prep, not that anyone but Bryan remembers, but this year it's been almost entirely on Juli. When I ask Frankie what he's doing sitting there, fully aware of the controversy he's causing, he says evenly, \"Just soaking in the atmosphere. You never know if this is gonna be your last time coaching, your last ball game, your last day on earth.\" I have no idea if he's psyching the other side out or if he's truly taking a Zen moment, reminding himself that this is a game, after all, it's supposed to be fun, as he's always telling his kids\u2014and real life? Well, that's the deadly serious stuff. But he sounds sincere when he says, \"I never spend time just soaking it in, being here.\"\n\nSo then it begins, the championship game, in all its heated commotion. And there's Bryan watching it all, arms folded across his chest, his head nodding up and down like a man agreeing with everything that's going on in front of him. Yes to the screaming and shouting, to the kids looking sharp in their uniforms, crouched in the field, avideyed. Yes to the mothers who played for Las Mu&amp;amp;#xF1;ecas twenty years ago and carried their teammate's small casket, reunited now on the Phillies sideline, yelling like they're the ones out there with the championship on the line. Yes to Tun-Tun's father in his guayabera shirt, showing up for the first time to watch his son play, and yes to Sedale's dad, who drove in from Philly and is standing next to his ex, Tanya, sharing her pride in their boy. \"This is what small-town America values,\" Bryan says. \"That's quality family time. And you know what? I made that shit happen in the hood.\" So, yes to the coaches who rose from the streets of Camden and took 200 kids under their wings. Yes to their summer\u2014they spent it playing outdoors in the most dangerous city in America. Yes to winning and yes to losing, because both are gonna happen today.\n\n Movie Theaters in Camden: 0\n\n Abandoned Buildings: 3,000\n\nWhen it's over, one team will explode in a happy, jumping, hooting, hugging, tumbling carnival. The other will gather in a miserable huddle, grimy, heartbroken. Those kids will weep. Which will make some of their mothers cry, too. Their coach will barely be able to speak because his eyes are full of tears and he doesn't want them to fall, so his voice will be sliver-thin when he says, \"It hurts, doesn't it.\" Not even a question mark. And then, his voice held together by sheer resolve, all his weteyed boys turned to him, \"I'm proud of you. You played your hearts out. Proud of you.\"\n\nNow, on the field, the champions douse one another with Gatorade while their coaches stand like happy kings, having proved once again that practicing four times a week does indeed pay off. And there's Bryan, making his way toward them, holding the championship trophy, a big-ass grin on his face and the bigger picture in his head:\n\nPhillies won, 11&amp;amp;#x2013;10. North Camden remains undefeated.\n\nKATHY DOBIE's last article for GQ, Raider. QB Crusher. Murderer?, appeared in the February 2013 issue."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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