Cook: Howard School baseball saves lives

David Cook

They could build a trillion-dollar-Jumbotron-retractable-dome stadium, but the best, most stirring baseball story on South Broad Street isn't the possible relocation of the Chattanooga Lookouts.

It's around the corner, away from the development and attention.

At The Howard School.

With its resurrected baseball team, which starts a new season Monday.

With its leprechaun-green field, which has never looked better.

"When I played Little League out here, this field looked nothing like this. It was completely trash," said C.J. James, a sophomore, while taking grounders at third base earlier this week. "I was afraid to slide. The ground was so tough, your feet would get caught up."

It is perfect symbolism for urban poverty: a landscape of arresting scarcity that catches your feet, grinding and halting any advancement or hope or way forward and out.

But today?

Stop by the field Monday at 5:30 for the first pitch of this spring season. Notice the green-dream grass. The snow-white chalk lines and the rich infield dirt. The bullpens (the team helped build) and visitor dugouts (also helped) and home dugouts (you got it) and new benches and bleachers and new outfield fence (yep.) Notice the buckets of balls and bats everywhere, once so hard to find, back when players shared gloves and duct-taped wooden bats just to play one more game, and now in surplus, in excess, with kids stepping and tripping over them there are so many.

Only a few short years ago, baseball was dead at Howard.

In 2016, the 32-year-old Spanish teacher and coach Jon Johnson came to Howard with a vision: rebuild lives by rebuilding a baseball team by rebuilding its field.

Through rain. Freezing cold. Saturdays. Sunday afternoons. Exhuming outfield trash and digging ditches and building pitching mounds. That group of young black men living in dangerous and forgotten parts of the city did what many called impossible: they turned that once-dead field into something powerfully alive.

Along the way, they remade themselves.

And made friends with strangers all across the city.

So many of you - from Lookout Mountain to Soddy-Daisy - became the team's 10th man. Strangers became donors and fans, giving time, money, supplies - the team started the season $500 in debt and ended with an estimated $80,000 - even stopping by practice, just to watch.

"Chattanooga and these guys are the heroes," Johnson said. "Come see what you helped build."

Howard School baseball saves lives.

"I'd probably be somewhere, the streets," said Rod Crutcher, a junior and outfielder. "In my neighborhood, there's a lot of gang violence."

But he wasn't in his neighborhood when he said that. He was standing in short outfield, shagging balls, a rookie last year who is now a team leader.

"Blood, sweat and tears," he said. "Coach is making me a better person. Come on time. Stay consistent. All the things my father didn't teach me. He's my second father."

For Rod and others, baseball is more than just baseball.

"It's freedom," he said. "I feel like a better person. When I make contact with the ball, see it flying through the air, that's freedom. I let my anger go on that ball."

Everybody's talking about the new development on South Broad Street, but the real development - of human capital and human spirit - is already underway with this team.

"We invest in stocks to reap dividends. But what about society? How can we invest in a better society? Through investing and loving people. Modeling for our youth and children how to live responsibly and love our neighbor. We must invest in their lives in order to see a return in our society," Johnson said.

Without question, the team wants to win more games this season. (Visit Howard High School baseball on Facebook for the schedule.) But Johnson's long vision is using that field to magnet-draw kids and families into community and relationship. He dreams of summer teams, tournaments, pick-up ball, coaching clinics for dads and moms. Of saving lives for years to come.

After all, they already rebuilt their own field.

Easy as a can of corn.

Think they can't do something even bigger?

"This has helped me be a role model, and I've never had one in my life," said Deonte McCroskey, the team's first baseman. "It's helped me teach other kids, or my own son or daughter one day. I didn't just build this for myself. I built it for future kids. It was made to be a franchise for future kids."

David Cook writes a Sunday column and can be reached at dcook@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6329. Follow him on Facebook at DavidCookTFP.