Howie Traveler, a journeyman baseball coach, finally gets his shot at managing in the big leagues. He’s paid his dues, learned (most of) his lessons, and gained as good an understanding of the game and its players as anyone else. His star player, the mostly inscrutable Jay Alcazar, gets embroiled in a career-threatening legal dispute, and Howie is involved much more intimately than he’d like.

Deford has been around sports a long time. His characters are rich enough to be very ambivalent about their sport. Most every tale worth telling has two sides, and Deford lets Alcazar’s play out slowly. Is the famous athlete arrogant or merely as tired as anyone would be given all the attention? When people drape themselves all over you, is it possible to hold them in high esteem? While there are banalities of the modern athlete that are laughable—and Deford lets us laugh at them—there are ambiguities that deserve better than a cheap insult.