This marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of a classic of baseball fiction. William Brashler's novel is the story of a black barnstorming ball club in 1939, before Jackie Robinson broke baseball's unofficial color barrier. It was made into a popular film in 1976 that starred James Earl Jones, Billy Dee Williams, and Richard Pryor. This edition includes a new preface by the author and an introduction by Peter Bjarkman that sets the novel in the context both of scholarly literature on the Negro Baseball Leagues and of sports fiction.