Electric Stuff: A Novel

The definitive baseball comedy, Electric Stuff is a story of the people behind the game and the chaos they create as they try to find their place in the 21st century.

The worst player in baseball has daddy issues. Mostly because they’re both dead.

Charlie Conroy has scraped together 22 awful seasons of low league baseball, forever hoping to escape his father’s shadow. The son of Jackie Conroy, a talented minor leaguer who died tragically young, Charlie has built his career on a willingness to get hit by beanballs, and by having a stepfather who owns his team. When his stepfather also dies, Charlie’s mother, Margaret, installs her son as a coach of Jackie’s old team, the nearly bankrupt Cape Haddock Coelacanths.

The Coelacanths are a flawed group with a crusty manager and a few glimpses of talent. In the middle of a hideous mid-season slump, the team’s prospects for survival look bleak until chance cuts them a break: their major league affiliate is sending its star player, a future Hall of Famer, nicknamed “The Franchise,” for an injury rehabilitation game that will be televised on the Fourth of July.

With the eyes of the nation now on the Coelacanths, it will take the combined skills of Charlie and Margaret to turn the game into a landmark event that could save both the team and the legend of Jackie Conroy for good.