How A Group of Degenerates Became Immortalized By One Of Their Own

The True Story Of ‘The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates’

By Will Jordan

John Albert and his Los Angeles-bred pals have always lived life by their own terms. They grabbed life by the balls and let it drag them through flesh-ripping briars and doom-darkened depths, but importantly held on until they saw the light at the end in the form of an illuminated baseball mound.
As the old adage goes, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” These cats took those familiar words to heart and transformed their tumultuous times of hell-bent turmoil into one of America’s most underappreciated success stories—The Wrecking Crew, based on the rise of an amateur league baseball team, “The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates.”
While it’s impossible to not chuckle at times while reading The Wrecking Crew, it also causes a shudder, especially when reminded that it is based on factual events that occurred to the Pirates.
“It’s totally autobiographical,” Albert says. “Everything is true except when I occasionally compacted several scenes and put them in the same setting. The things in the book that people hoped weren’t true were all true. It was like writing a journal or something.”
Albert got his book deal on the Griffith Park Pirates by accident.
LA Weekly was having a “Best of…” issue and a friend asked him to submit something, according to the writer. Albert submitted a paragraph on amateur league baseball. His paragraph didn’t make the “Best of…” cut, but it was forwarded to someone in the features department, who in turn asked him to write it as a cover story for the alternative publication.
“When it ran it got a lot of attention from movie people,” Albert says. “One director wanted to option it back then, but he snorted a lot of coke on day and played basketball and his heart exploded. The book deal was just an offshoot of the movie stuff.”
Simon and Schuster gave him a year to write the book.
“At the time I was sick of my friends and sick of the story,” he says. “I was barely a working screenwriter. It never occurred to me that my life was interesting or different. Only by telling someone else did I realize that it was a good story.”
Albert set out to find his old buddies, interviewed them and “fell in love with them all over again.”
Albert never worried about whom he might offend when writing the book, as a matter of fact; he says he didn’t even write it with the thought that it would ever even be published.
“I didn’t think about that stuff. The sex, drugs and violence really occurred. It’s all in there,” he says.
The only person he’s ever worried about since the book was published is a minor character who was a convicted murderer and was on the team.
“He was let out because of insanity and we never found out the specifics. I heard he was institutionalized again. I just hope he’s not in there reading the book over and over again, waiting to get out. I keep thinking I’m going to be giving a reading and he’ll be out there,” he laughs.
To add to the experience, when Albert does a reading at a bookstore in the LA area, he brings along some of the characters that are in the book.
“It definitely makes it more interesting to be reading about Dave, who overdosed and went into a coma and have him limp out on stage,” he says.
While the book is about the season the Pirates did win, the streak hasn’t continued, but Albert says it’s not the end of the world.
“We play these huge, steroided jock guys who destroy their equipment when they lose. We have fun and joke around but of course we’d love to win,” he says. “We’re just now old curmudgeons.”
Albert currently is acting as a consultant to a friend who has agreed to write a script on the book for free. The screenwriter, who also wrote scripts for Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Machinist, is midway through The Wrecking Crew script now and Albert hope it will be an edgy “Trainspotting meets Bad News Bears” end result.
“I know the film world enough that they could make some sort of sappy John Goodman film with no drugs,” he laughs.
Despite his constant jabs at LA’s seedy materialistic stigma, Albert is loyal to his hometown.
“This is where my world is,” he says. “I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ll probably always live here, even though I may go to other places for a while. Occasionally it’s on fire, but it’s home.
“It’s just amazing,” he adds. “I’m blind to everything that’s wrong with LA. The people that are emblematic of the superficial narcissism here, I don’t know and I don’t see. Sure they have their Botox parties, but I’m not invited to any of them.”
While the book’s success has been a positive experience for nearly all of the people involved, Albert is not trying to disillusion any readers about the ultimate outcome of the characters.
“I’d love to say everything’s better, and sometimes I think it is better, but some go back to the drugs and disappear for a while,” he says. “Nobody’s come close to any great happy ending or anything.”

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