Gideon Clarke is a man on a quest. He is out to prove to the world, as his father tried before him, that the world-champion Chicago Cubs traveled to Onamata, Iowa, in the summer of 1908 for an exhibition game against all-stars from the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, an amateur league. The game, which was to be short, pleasant, and, the Cubs thought, one-sided, turned into a titanic battle of over two thousand innings, played mostly in the pouring rain. This game is not on the record books. No one remembers it or the Confederacy. But Gideon Clarke knows it happened, and he is determined to set the record straight.

Like in his previous novel, Shoeless Joe, which was the basis for the movie Field of Dreams, Kinsella creates "a loving mixture of baseball, life and fantasy, in a world where dreams don't have to come true, because they have a validity all their own" (Publishers Weekly).