Season of Preacher Jack

the long version

During the Summer of 1961, the sports world watches as Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris race to break Babe Ruth's home run record. In the semi-rural South, a boy, "almost twelve"--Caught in the middle of his parents' disintegrating marriage--and a disenchanted preacher, who has left the ministry and opened a country store/gas station near the boy's home, begin to follow the home run race and form a bond, and Preacher Jack becomes one of those people who touches a life only briefly, but whose influence lingers for a lifetime.