Morris Buttermaker, an alcoholic pest removal worker and former (briefly) professional baseball player, is recruited to coach and train a failing baseball team. All of these twelve-year-olds have been thrown out of the league. After losing every game they have played in so far, the kids force the coach to straighten up and teach them how to win before the season is over.

"Traces the ... story of Merl Eberly and his Clarinda A's baseball team, which he tended over the course of five decades, transforming them from a town team to a collegiate summer league powerhouse. Along with Ozzie Smith, future manager Bud Black, and star player Von Hayes, Merl developed scores of major league players (six of which are currently playing). In the process, Merl taught them to be men, insisting on hard work, integrity, and responsibility"--Dust...

Don Zimmer had his first taste of baseball glory in 1948 as a member of a national champion American Legion team. He was drafted by the Brooklyn Dodgers, only to have his career—and life—threatened when he was beaned in a minor league game in 1953.

After a miraculous recovery, he went on to play for Brooklyn's only world-championship team in 1955, the L.A. Dodgers' first world-championship team four years later, and as an original

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“There are teachers with a rare ability to enter a child’s mind;
it’s as if their ability to get there at all gives them the right to stay forever.”
There was a turning point in Michael Lewis’s life, in a baseball game when he was fourteen years old. The irascible and often terrifying Coach Fitz put the ball in his hand with the game on the line and managed to convey such confident trust in Lewis’ ability...