For seventeen-year-old Danny Boles, a 5' 5" shortstop out of Tenkiller, Oklahoma, the summer of 1943 would be a season to remember.  The country's at war, and professional baseball needs able-bodied men.  Danny's headed for Highbridge, Georgia -- home of the Goober Pride peanut butter factory and the Highbridge Hellbenders, a Class C farm club in the Chattahoochee Valley League.  He's a scrappy player with one minor quirk: a violent encounter on the train to Georgia has rendered him mute, his vocal cords tied up in knots.

Danny's idiosyncrasy, however, is nothing compared to that of his new Hellbender roommate, an erudite seven-foot giant by the name of Jumbo Hank Clerval.  With his yellow eyes, strangely scarred face, and sausage-sized fingers, Hanks seems to have been put together in a meat-packing plant.  But he plays a mean first base and can hit the ball a mile.  With the Hellbenders in a pennant race as hot as the relentless Georgia sun, the eloquent Clerval forms a special kinship with the speechless kid from Oklahoma.  Danny soon realizes that Hank is not an ordinary man but something more complex . . . more mysterious than he'd imagined.
[From the flyleaf of the Bantam edition]

Dedication:
for Jeri, Jamie, and Stephanie, with love
and for my mother, Maxine Elaine Willis, with belated thanks for teaching me to love reading and for many games of backyard catch in Mulvane, Kansas
and in memory of my dad, Lee O. Bishop (1920-1989), who took me out to see the Memphis Chicks, and who half-expected me (I think) to play shortstop in the bigs