As in Shoeless Joe and his other baseball fiction, Kinsella uses the sport not as subject but as context in these ten stories, which range from the realistic to the fantastic. Here a legendary base stealer for St. Louis Browns tries to perpetuate his skills, an extraterrestrial pretends to be the Seattle Mariners mascot, and three middle-aged baseball buddies play a nostalgic pickup game in the women's wear section of K-mart. The collection was first published in 1988 as The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt.