Opening Day: Or, the Return of Satchel Paige
by Les Standford
Reminiscent of Bernard Malamudâ€(tm)s The Natural, W. P. Kinsellaâ€(tm)s Shoeless Joe, and the film Field of Dreams, OPENING DAY is a novella with the kind of magic charm that transcends sport and rises to the level of heroic myth. When the owner of a downtrodden team in the AA Mid Florida League discovers that his aging groundskeeper was once a star in the Negro Leagues, a public relations scheme is hatched. But what begins as a stunt leads to an astonishing outcome that no one, least of all Buck Wilson, the unassuming former great, could have predicted.