THE ONLY PRESCRIPTION IS MORE BASEBALL: HOW ANTOINE MOTEN IS ATTEMPTING TO MAKE THE INNER-CITY ELITE twisted path that has broken so many families and so many hearts.
By Josh Citron
SS
D
12
“Baseball was definitely a tool to get me where I am today.” Antoine said about how the game impacted his life, “I make a pretty good living, I work for Aerospace Corp., been there for 18 years, and I’ve done it all through the love of baseball. I think if hadn't stuck with the game I definitely would have gone off track just because of the environment and all the ways I could have went if I didn’t have the game of baseball.”
CATION AN DU
CA
For Antoine, baseball has been woven into the fabric of his life ever since he was a kid running across dirt fields in South Central, Los Angeles. At that time, there was no expectations or visions of grandeur associated with the game but instead it was just “something to do.” But for adolescents raised amongst the degrading schools and increasing gang violence of the South Central streets, anything that consisted of a productive use of time was preferable to the often violent and deadly alternative. Antoine was determined not to become another statistic lost to the seemingly endless struggle between those that live-with and those that live-without. Even he admits that without baseball, Antoine’s idle hands would have led him down the same dark and
E
Every single weekday at 4am, Antoine Moten wakes up and drives to his day job at The Aerospace Corporation, a California nonprofit that operates a federally funded research and development center in El Segundo. But even as his car whizzes on below a slumbering California sky not yet illuminated by the morning sun, his mind is usually locked in on one subject baseball.
RE E ER R A DIN E
Antoine never lost his enthusiasm for the game. The passion and commitment it takes to hone a craft as technical as baseball has led him into a lucrative, stable profession that keeps food on his table and the lights on in his home. In other words, Antoine Moten is exactly who every South Central kid should be aspiring to become. Working in defense contracting isn’t quite as sexy as playing in the big leagues and studying for the bar exam doesn’t seem quite as exhilarating as warming up for a Game 7 but for Antoine Moten his mission is to create an ecosystem where success is measured using a different metric. In order to put his passion into practice, Antoine founded the Inglewood
www.jack9baseballmagazine.com
