Backstop lives a double life, and both are crumbling.
He is a minor league catcher and an operative in training for The Moe Berg Society, a secret intelligence group that uses baseball as a front for its spy work. The mysterious disappearance of Backstop’s fellow trainee, Mark, has plunged him into a career-threatening slump. He gets one last chance at redemption when his handler asks him to investigate a connection between rumors of a mole and The Scouts, a faction of old-school spies hell-bent on seizing leadership of The Society. Backstop’s mission is complicated by his new roommate, The Swing, an aging slugger working on a major league comeback, and by Brooke, a tenacious reporter who suspects Backstop holds the key to her investigation into Mark’s disappearance. With one eye on his plummeting batting average and the other on the mounting casualties of his mission, Backstop attempts to unravel a conspiracy that could change the game forever before he unravels himself.
MATTHEW CALLAN gripes about the Mets for Amazin' Avenue and has griped on other topics for Vice, The Classical, Baseball Prospectus, and other sites. His fiction has attained bridesmaid status for prizes given by Zoetrope:All Story, Bomb Magazine, and Nimrod International Journal, while his nonfiction has been cited in Dave Eggers' Best American Nonrequired Reading series and in the Wikipedia entry for Action Park (to date, his most crowning achievement). He also hosts Replacement Players, a podcast wherein he forces guests to watch and discuss old sporting events with him.