LOS ANGELES — Nothing is wrong with where Dominic Smith grew up. The yellow-brown lawns up the hill on 124th Street could use more tending. It would be nice to see more pedestrians — anyone, really. The faded paint on many houses suggests that more are rented than owned.
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Dominic's nephew, Jailen Martin, practicing in the family's backyard, south of Los Angeles. The area produced many major league players in the 60s and 70s, but few in recent years. More Photos »
But there are few barred windows, no graffiti and hardly any other outward signs of trouble, as there might be a little farther north in the heart of South-Central or east across the Harbor Freeway toward Compton, Calif.
This is a neighborhood in which Smith always felt comfortable playing catch out front and rarely had to look over his shoulder while visiting a neighbor.
Even so, it was made clear to him from a young age that a better life awaited him somewhere else. That was evident when his mother, sometimes with his help, would wash floors and clean bathrooms at his private elementary school to help cover his tuition. Or when his parents, in separate conversations in separate homes, admonished him not to repeat some of the choices they had come to regret.
It was also not lost on the teenage Smith when baseball took him to affluent suburbs with manicured fields and magnificent homes, and, as the years went by, to New York, Colorado, Florida, Australia and China.
“It was beautiful,” Smith said. “It opened up my closed mind in thinking what was around the inner city, what was around my block and my friends here. It really opened up my mind to other cultures, other people’s lifestyles. It just helped me realize 124th Street isn’t the only place or area I could live.
“Friends I grew up with, if they didn’t play baseball, they’ve never been on an airplane before. All they know is their area of the inner city, what they do with their homies. They don’t know too much of nothing but that, and they don’t plan on getting to know nothing but that. It really helped me think that, O.K., I don’t have to live here my whole life, and I could not be afraid to leave and go and experience new things.”
A new life is unfolding for Smith since he signed a $2.6 million contract with the Mets, who selected him with the 11th pick in last month’s amateur draft. The Mets coveted Smith, a left-handed-hitting first baseman, because it is not hard to watch his silky swing and graceful glove and envision a franchise cornerstone once his cherubic face and his 6-foot, 195-pound frame fill out.
But Smith was struggling with such projections on his 18th birthday several weeks ago, a day he spent packing, celebrating and saying goodbye to friends and relatives as he prepared for a cross-country flight the next morning to the Mets’ minor league headquarters in Port St. Lucie, Fla. In Smith’s mind, he was still the boy who slept with his glove under his pillow and dressed in his Little League uniform to watch games on television.
“Honestly, it still seems like a dream,” he said, sitting on the sofa in his mother’s house, laughing that he had never seen as much money as he was now being paid. “I’ve dreamed about this since I was a little boy, but you never really think, actually, that it can come true.”
Declining Numbers
Smith’s incredulity is well founded. On opening day, African-Americans accounted for only 8.5 percent of major league roster spots (about two players per team). It remains to be seen whether the last two drafts, in which 13 African-Americans were chosen in the first round, are a sign that past initiatives, like the MLB Urban Youth Academy — Smith attended one in Compton, Calif. — are creating a revival in the number of black prospects.
In the 1960s and ’70s, the predominantly African-American neighborhoods south of Los Angeles produced a trove of baseball players: Ozzie Smith, Eddie Murray, Reggie Smith, Chet Lemon, Bob Watson, Dock Ellis, George Hendricks, Lyman Bostock, Dan Ford, Chili Davis, Eric Davis, Bobby Tolan and Don Wilson among them. But when the Mets chose Darryl Strawberry with the No. 1 overall pick in 1980, it turned out not to be a crowning moment as much as a last hurrah.
As basketball’s popularity grew, financing for park programs was cut, and the advent of travel baseball priced out many youths from low-income families. A pipeline became a trickle. Coco Crisp is the rare current major leaguer who grew up in the inner city here.
Baseball, perhaps more than any other sport, requires repetition, and those repetitions require partners to throw batting practice, hit infield grounders or catch a bullpen session, and instructors to hone the game’s finer points.
“What’s happening today, the No. 1 problem is there’s no culture, no real training,” said Wil Aaron, a Los Angeles native and former Orioles draft pick who coached Dominic Smith at Serra High School, a private school in nearby Gardena, Calif. “Natural athleticism won’t get you there. If you have no training, you’re not even on the map, and in the inner city, there’s no real training.”
William Denson
Dominic's mother Yvette LaFleur, left, and father, Clay Smith. More Photos »
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Along with the culture of baseball, the history has largely disappeared. Smith, though he knows contemporary baseball well, was unaware until recently how many players had once come from the area he was reared in. His father said it was not long ago when Smith first learned who Strawberry was.
Ken Landreaux, a former Dodgers center fielder who grew up in Compton and worked with Smith at the Urban Youth Academy, said that knowing major leaguers came from the same neighborhood was a “real big motivator” for teenagers.
“I let those kids know I grew up right down the street from the academy,” Landreaux said. “Everybody has a chance — you can be a professional something if you make the right choices.”
Smith was introduced to baseball when his mother took him to the park to watch a friend’s son play T-ball. Smith was engrossed. He began to play at age 7, and he would watch major league games on TV, then go out in the yard and mimic a pitcher’s delivery or a batter’s stance. He rarely rode a bike or played video games.
Basketball, which his father played in high school, never exerted its pull, nor did any other sport. By the time he got through Little League at age 12, Smith attended the Urban Youth Academy, where he received more advanced instruction and was exposed to better play. Soon coaches asked his parents if Smith could play for their travel teams. Often that involved driving east, a half-hour or more, to Orange and Riverside Counties. Later, it became flights and nights in hotels. Because Smith was so talented, coaches were willing to make sure that he had transportation and that his fees were covered.
“All we asked them to do is take care of Dominic like he was their son,” Clay Smith, his father, said. “We paid for what we could, but it was a blessing that he was so good: he could play for free.”
‘The Platinum Child’
As Smith’s opportunities expanded, so did his worldview. He noticed that his first travel team had only one other black player, and it was rarely different in the opposing dugout, an observation he called a red flag. As he came to understand how few opportunities blacks from poor neighborhoods had to play baseball, travel also opened his eyes to how few opportunities they had for a better life. It is why, he said, his parents put him in private schools.
“I try to look at myself that I’m not a statistic,” Smith said.
In many ways, his parents were. Smith’s father, Clay, and his mother, Yvette LaFleur, were childhood acquaintances, and each had children, six between them, when Dominic was born. They lived separately and worked together to rear their children. Neither parent had attended college, so their job prospects were limited. For a while, LaFleur, who now works in child care, was on public assistance, and she struggled with drugs and alcohol. (She said she had been sober for 15 years.) Clay, who trains and grooms dogs, said he had similar troubles.
“His dad and I, whatever we had, we shared,” LaFleur said. “We always had a household of kids. I’d open my door, and a lot of people come in and out. If that’s what we chose to do with our life, that’s O.K. You have to give back. Dominic is aware that there’s a calling bigger than him, bigger than baseball. There’s a team that helped him get to this point.”
When his brothers and sisters poke fun at Smith, calling him the golden child, LaFleur corrects them.
“No,” she said. “He’s the platinum child.”
Smith is polite and acutely aware. But if he becomes a great player or a great success, it appears unlikely to be through sheer force of will. For Smith, that path is paved not with obstacles to be overcome, but with puzzles to be solved. It is not a coincidence that his favorite subject is math, which he enjoys because problems can be solved in different ways, just as different swings can hit a baseball square. His demeanor on the field might be best described as dispassionate.
“That’s what some scouts like about me; that’s what some scouts hate about me,” Smith said. “They see me play and feel like I’m not giving 100 percent, like I’m too cool. But it’s how I play — I try not to get caught up in the antics or the emotion. I don’t play the game with emotion. If you play with emotion, you make emotional mistakes.”
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Aaron, his high school coach, once scolded Smith for trotting around the bases and has warned him that it can be hard to alter a bad reputation. But he also noted that Smith’s coolness would serve him well.
“To play the game at the next level, you must have the big-dog mentality,” Aaron said. “He’s the type that wants to be up at the plate down one run. He loves doing it. He’s in the right place in New York. He loves the stage. Some of them, it’s too much pressure. But Domo, he likes to perform well.”
New York, New York
In just a few weeks, Smith has gotten an inkling of what awaits him. When he attended a game at Citi Field after the draft, he was asked for autographs and to pose for pictures. But he was also asked, seriously it seemed, why he would not be in the lineup that night to replace the struggling Ike Davis, the first baseman who was once thought of as a building block but recently spent several weeks in the minors trying to reorient himself.
“New York is pretty crazy,” Smith said, chuckling. “I try not to get into that, but you do hear things, and it is pretty nuts. It just puts a smile on my face. But I never feel pressure. The fans are not going to bother me, whether I do bad and they’re talking trash or I do good and they’re loving me.”
Strawberry, who recently met Smith, said that even if Smith would not be burdened with the same level of expectations that he was, Smith would have better support within the organization. Still, New York is New York. And the Mets, who are inclined to tout the future as long as the present remains a struggle, are the Mets.
“I came up with a team that was in last place, and I was the savior,” said Strawberry, who struggled with the trappings of fame. “Hopefully, he doesn’t have to go through that. The whole atmosphere of coming to New York — the expectations are greater than anything. It’s not like a normal place. The key for him is to be able to play without having the pressure on him. In a city like that, for a high draft pick, the expectations are really high.”
Asked if he is good at saying no, Smith laughed.
“No, honestly, I’m not,” he said. “But my parents have no problem saying no.”
His parents believe their son, so much wiser and worldly than they were at 18, will make better choices. A financial planner will provide Smith an allowance, penciling out a budget down to the number of socks he will need. He wants to buy his mother a house and a car, but she is resisting. Nothing is wrong with what she has. She is saving her aspirations for her son, who she says has given her so much: sobriety and a purpose.
“He believes that he does have a special calling through baseball,” LaFleur said. “He has a platform to do whatever he needs to do.”
That platform just happens to exist far from home, in a place with green fields and sparkling diamonds, otherwise known as a land of opportunity.