A Chance to Win: An Ex-Con, a Little League Team, and the Quest to Redeem an American City

When Rodney Mason, an ex-con drug dealer from Newark's rough South Ward, was shot and paralyzed, he vowed to turn his life around. A former high-school pitching ace with a 93 mph fastball, Mason decided to form a Little League team to help boys avoid the street life that had claimed his youth and mobility. In A Chance to Win, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jonathan Schuppe follows Mason and his team, both on and off the field. Predictably, the players struggle―they endure poverty, unstable family lives with few positive male role models, failing schools, and dangerous neighborhoods―but through the fists and tears, lopsided losses and rare victories, this bunch of misfits becomes a team, and in doing so gives the community something to root for. Jonathan Schuppe's book is both a penetrating, true-to-life portrait of what's at stake for kids growing up poor in America's inner cities and a portrait of Newark itself, a struggling city that has recently known great hope as well as failure.