In this imaginative novel, Philip Roth converts the status of baseball from a national myth and pastime into the basis for biting satire, replete with heroism and treachery, wordplay, and an unforgettable cast of characters. Locked away in an asylum, once-famous sports journalist Word Smith attempts to write the great American novel through the story of one of the United States’ most celebrated baseball teams. The team’s epic feats in the now-defunct Patriot League were soon forgotten when, in the mid-1940s, a Communist conspiracy infiltrated the heart of the United States in an effort to destroy the American way of life from the inside. Starting with baseball, it sabotaged one of the country’s top baseball teams, and the fortunes of its leaders and players along with it.