The Announcement

Episode 1: "The Announcement"

I want to take you back to West Englewood, 1980. Before I tell you anything else about this book, I need you to understand what a baseball team meant on a block like that, in a summer like that.

This isn't a book about baseball. I need to say that up front, because the title will fool you, the cover will fool you, and if you go in expecting box scores, you're going to miss what's actually happening on every page.

Kings of Concrete Field is about a neighborhood deciding, together, that something good was allowed to happen to it.

Gil Barnes is our narrator. He's a teenage boy on the South Side Comets, and he's telling this story looking backward you can hear it in the voice, that particular way people talk when they're describing something that changed them before they had the vocabulary to know it was changing them. Gil's got a brother, Arch, and there's a whole current running under this book about what it means to grow up in somebody's shadow, or maybe not a shadow maybe just next to somebody, on the same team, wearing the same jersey, and still having to find your own name inside that.

Then there's Gar. Gar is the captain, and if you've ever been on a team, any team, a sports team, a work team, a family you know there's always a Gar. The one who holds it together by sheer “will” when the adults aren't looking. And standing behind all of them is Uncle Carter. Uncle Carter coaches this team, and I'll tell you now, because it colors everything by the time we get to the end of this book, Uncle Carter is gone. He doesn't make it to see where these boys end up. I'm telling you that now, at the start, because I think you'll hear him differently in these early chapters if you know what's coming. You'll notice how he talks to these kids. You'll notice what he's actually trying to give them, which was never really about winning games.

The announcement: the one this episode is named for, is simple on its face. There's a tournament. The winner plays at Comiskey Park. Real base paths, real stands, the kind of field these boys have only ever seen from the bleachers or on a television with bad reception. And when that news lands on this block, in this book, it doesn't just excite a baseball team. It reorganizes an entire neighborhood's sense of what's possible for it.

I've thought a lot about why I wanted to start the commentary here, with the excitement, before we get into everything this book puts these kids through. And it's because I think joy at the start of a story is a promise. The book is telling you: remember this feeling, because I'm going to test it later. Hold onto Gil's brother. Hold onto Gar's certainty. Hold onto Uncle Carter's voice. Listen to Mina. Listen to Rafe. We're going to need all of it.

That's Part One. Free to everyone, because I want every single person who's curious about this book to feel what West Englewood in Chicago, felt, that day the announcement came down. Everything after this, you'll understand why it mattered so much.