Henry Spencer comes out of the army and is signed by the Oakland A`s. An amazing ballplayer, maybe the best ever, Henry remembers nothing about his past, and he sees baseball, weirdly, the way a physicist might. Meanwhile, the great physicist Arthur Hodges has recently died, and his grieving friend, Benny Rhodes, an ex-Red Sox fan, has left his wife and his MIT professorship to live in the Mojave Desert with a young pregnant waitress. When Henry and Benny collide, the real and the supernatural merge in a wild blend of baseball, physics, and satire.