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Journeyman relief pitcher Jonathan "Ditch" Klein was all set to be a replacement player during the 1994-1995 baseball strike...until the strike ended. Offered a contract in the minor leagues, on the same Upstate ballpark he once found success in high school, Ditch has one last chance to prove his worth. But to whom? A manager with an axe to grind, a father second-guessing his pitching decisions, a local sportswriter hailing him as a hometown hero, a decade older than his teammates and trying to resurrect an injury-ridden career...Ditch thinks he may have a possible back-up plan: become a sportswriter himself. The only question is whether he is a pitcher who aspires to be a writer, or the other way around...

Originally from Troy, New York, M. Thomas Apple spent part of his childhood in a tiny hamlet in the Helderbergs and his teenage years in a slightly larger village in the Adirondacks. He played high school baseball for four years and was a decent base-stealer, adequate outfielder, and terrible batter. Occasionally he dreams of the sole (running) homerun he hit on a 3-0 count, and the subsequent beaning that followed during the next at-bat.. He studied languages and literature as an undergraduate student at Bard College and later creative writing at the University of Notre Dame. a non-fiction book of essays ("Taking Leave: An American on paternity leave in Japan") is scheduled for publication in late 2015, followed by a collection of his short fiction and poetry ("Notes from the Nineties") in early 2016. After further studies at Temple University, he now teaches global issues and English as a second language at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. He lives in a house co-designed with his wife and partially decorated by his two daughters, nestled in the foothills of the mountains and surrounded by lots and lots of Japanese cedar and cicada.