GREAT BASEBALL STORIES 

Bernard Malamud's The Natural (1952):  W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe (1982): Michael Shaara's For Love of the Game (1991):

And now, in 2010, comes Art Tirrell's The Vitaman Effect

 Are your ready for the Vitaman man?

     In place of the satisfaction Jim Stronge should be feeling after a long career as a big league ballplayer, he is instead haunted by a sense of guilt. Guilt that goes all the way back to his teens and the day he first went against his mother's wishes; the day he chose baseball over music.

     Now, at 41, just released by the Yankees, Jim is face-to-face with his life to date. Sure, he had three 20 win seasons, and yes, he does have 200 career wins, but he's fallen short of his real goal of becoming the last man to ever win thirty games in a season - a feat that would have placed him among the best pitchers ever.

     So, what exactly has he accomplished? He has more money than he will ever spend, but money can't buy you love. He hasn't spoken to his mother or step-father in years. Family-less, he future seems empty. Worst of all, he's more afraid than ever that he's missed the mark and that his mother was right when she insisted he devote himself to what she said was his more important gift - the talent for the piano that has run in the family for generations.

     Jim's quest to win 30 games in a season has at its long-forgotten root his attraction to his stepsister Rina, the only woman he's ever loved. Rina is married, but that hasn't stopped them from becoming long-time friends and confidants.

     With the release, all seems lost until bullpen coach Eddie Walker hands Jim a slip of paper on which he’s scribbled the words, “Vigil T. Mann, Sunshine, Alabama.”

     Jim is skeptical at first, but soon finds himself gravitating toward the place - which turns out to be a rural co-op farm operated by a unique association of African-American families. They might not have electricity or inside plumbing, but they do play ball most nights after supper.

      Taken in, he begins the process of coming to terms with his failures, a journey that includes pounding #12 nails into a tree with a cannonball, hours atop the giant boulder up near the rim of the valley while he tries to see what Vigil T. Mann calls, “the spirits of the air,” and in the co-op church, an old Knabe, an upright piano with the widest keyboard Jim has ever seen.

     Slowly, he discovers that not everything known by men can be written down on paper, and as his spirit grows and the new pitch comes alive, he begins to dream of one last chance - and this time he's determined to make his stepsister Rina proud.

"Vigil T. Mann? Hell yes, I hearda' him. That man could make a baseball do things nobody never seen - not before - not since."