A story of family, of dreams deferred, and of a final chance at redemption. David Paxton, nearing the end of his minor league baseball career, returns to his hometown as much less the hero he once assumed he would become. When he meets Joan, and her son Ross, David believes he has found a way to acquire the love, support and family he's long been yearning for. But his overheated romancing of Joan makes her wary, and his attempt to mentor Ross meets with the boy's undisguised contempt. It appears his dreams of a future have died, and David's simmering rage threatens to erupt into violence. But David and Ross, a disturbed teenager heading down a path of increasing destructiveness, somehow find their way to each other and start up a most unlikely, mostly clandestine, friendship. David must break out of his own isolation to help the young boy and confront the dark secrets that haunt both their lives. He must become a father figure in a way he never imagined, and in so doing become a genuine hero off the field.—Anonymous

Loner DAVID PAXTON returns to his hometown, only to become obsessed with childhood friend JOAN and her troubled teenage son ROSS, seeing them as a last chance for a "perfect" life. David is quickly rejected by Joan, but breaks through Ross's volatile, destructive nature and forms an unlikely friendship with the boy, making himself the object of suspicion and condemnation by the town. Driven over the edge, David begins a dangerous descent, targeting town patriarch BILL HUSTON, the man who stands between him and Ross, and heading toward a final violent confrontation that will explode in the revelation of a dark secret, and the realization that David may be a most unlikely hero.—Michael Stewart and Howard Libov