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Set against the grime-and-glitter backdrop
of mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles, Wrong Side of the
Wall is the true story of a talented young athlete in
the days before special ability in sports was a ticket to
riches. Faced with a choice of probable success in the revered
but grueling world of major league baseball or the easy money,
fast times, and glamour of organized crime, Ralph “Blackie”
Schwamb tried to have it all. But the pull of the underworld
was inevitably too strong, and Blackie, a rising star pitcher
for the St. Louis Browns at twenty-two, was behind bars for
a brutal murder at twenty-three.
Wrong Side of the Wall grabs the
reader like a fast-paced novel, breathlessly racing through
Depression-era and World War II Los Angeles and into the postwar
economic boom, plunging into a world—from Mexico
to Canada—of gangsters, nightclubs, girls, guns,
gambling, and booze—and baseball, mostly behind
prison walls. Permanently separated from all chance of success—straight
or crooked—by his penchant for screwing up, Blackie
established himself as a legendary prison-yard baseball pitcher
and hitter. He was so renowned for his heat that baseball
scouts came from around the country to match hitting prospects
against him, and major and minor league players regularly
came to San Quentin and Folsom prisons to get the chance to
play against the prison phenom.
When at last Blackie got out of jail, he
was too old and battered to make the cut. A childhood friend
says of Blackie, “I looked up and he had tears in his
eyes. And he said, ‘You know . . . I really could have
been something.’ I guess I got a little misty-eyed myself.
What could you say to the guy? He had ruined his life, and
a few others along the way. You have to live with yourself,
and sometimes that’s punishment enough.”
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