The Opposite Field: A Memoir

A Portland Son's Memoir is a Home Run

Our language is peppered with baseball metaphors. We could barely communicate without them, especially at work: "She really struck out on that project, but he hit it out of the park." The game is so romanticized we even use those metaphors to describe amorous grappling: "I got to second base, dude."

There's no question baseball is deeply ingrained in American culture, and the home run represents our greatest victory. In his memoir, The Opposite Field, Jesse Katz explains how he used baseball to find his place in this world.

Katz grew up in Portland, the son of two local luminaries, politician Vera and artist Mel. His relationship with baseball was typical for the early 1970s: attending Beavers games, shuffling cards into teams and playing Little League at Wallace Park. He left Portland to attend toney Bennington College but, enamored with Latino culture, he eventually landed in a gritty Los Angeles neighborhood while covering gangs for the Los Angeles Times.

He fell in love with a Nicaraguan woman, married and eventually had a son, Max. But as his marriage fell apart, he turned to the all-American sport to keep his boy close. "Baseball was suddenly more than warm, fuzzy memory making. It became a tool, for instilling my values, for inoculating Max. Every time I suggested we 'throw the ball around,' it was really code for getting us out of the house. In the name of catch we were constructing a relationship that was separate and proprietary, a relationship designed to survive whatever tumult came ahead."

Katz made the decision to be his son's T-ball coach and eventually worked his way up to become the local Little League commissioner. As he tells it, he nearly single-handedly took a corrupt, ragtag group of teams and turned it into a proud, financially solvent league. Baseball consumed his life and along the way, he built a relationship with his son that was as solid as a Louisville Slugger.

Dad Lit (what The New York Times recently called "Dadsploitation") has become a popular venue for male writers to crow about how evolved and involved they are as fathers. Katz's memoir treads that now-familiar terrain as he tries to maintain a balance between self-satisfied liberal savior and comically incompetent single dad. Mostly he succeeds, but at times he pops one foul and turns into a pure idiot, like when he celebrates his 40th birthday by traveling to Cuba specifically to find a young, desperate Latina for some sex-capades. This confession is difficult to read, and it must have been hard for Katz to admit his behavior was abominable. Yet he does; his self-examination is brutally honest, which is what saves the book from cloying smugness.

He's not perfect. He forces his flu-stricken kid to pitch in a championship game. He sleeps with his married co-commissioner. He makes mistake after mistake after mistake, yet he is the first to admit it. At times, his book reads like a manual for running a community sports league, with play-by-play commentary on practically every baseball game he coached. But it's also the moving and humorous story of one man's personal journey to find an identity.

Portlanders get the added bonus of insight into our former mayor and her role as a mother and grandmother. Vera Katz raised her son to be independent, introspective and idealistic. "It seems safe to say that I have an overdeveloped sense of social responsibility, maybe even a reckless disregard for my own comfort and care," Katz writes. He feels guilty about leaving his parents and Portland behind until he has a moment of clarity: "All this time I was running, disrupting patterns, subverting expectations, I was doing just what my parents had dedicated their lives to. I was investing myself in a community, in a culture, in a game, in a park -- fixing, rescuing." With his precise journalistic eye, Katz ultimately chronicles his lifelong quest to finally reach home plate. And it's a grand slam.

• Read more about this book

Plus: The paper's award-winning books section, published on Sundays, strips the buzz from national bestsellers and directs readers to little-known regional gems in a concise package.

New subscribers can receive four weeks of home delivery free as part of a trial offer.