SLO PITCH is a story about making peace with being a big fish in a small pond. MICKEY OBINSKI is an almost-forty-year-old baseball player who never made it to the majors but is now a superstar in a Slo Pitch industrial league softball team in Los Angeles. Mickey has never completely accepted the demotion of his dreams and now, into his frustrated life, enters his almost 20-year-old doppelganger with deep resentments of his own. His principal complaint is that Mickey submerged him 20 years earlier when he surrendered to an ordinary life as a family man and factory worker. The submersion worked for Mickey until he began to look his 40th birthday in the face. More formidable an antagonist than his ghostly younger self is Mickey's boss, ED BARKBEAN, the un-athletic owner and captain (due to his ownership of the factory) of the team whose quest for a championship borders on the pathological. The boss fires Mickey's buddy who's a good worker but a lousy second baseman, and replaces him with a ringer - Ed's daughter's super athletic surfer boyfriend. Mickey is recruited by Ed to help legitimize the firing to the union, which forces him to confront his own morality and the price he's willing to pay for the league championship and a small share of the factory. While primarily a comedy, SLO PITCH is also a serious story of a working class man's regrets juxtaposed against his disoriented ghost self and the fun and camaraderie of slo-pitch softball.
About the Author: Carl Weinberg was born in Philadelphia and as a long time Phillies fan learned early the value of wit and humor in dealing with disappointment. As an inner-city high school teacher, he observed how failure in school crippled the hopes of his students. Later, as a college professor at UCLA he published a number of books and articles dealing mostly with kids at risk and their struggle to survive the institutions supposedly set up to serve them. The amusing ways in which students and teachers deal with the contradictions of education led to an early publication of his trade book entitled Education is a Shuck. More recently, his book First Year in an Urban High School, co-written with his son, was published by Rowman & Littlefield. Since his retirement from the university he has been writing humorous fiction, mostly focused on how underdogs survive in a tough world... and sometimes even prevail.