Doug Morris, a cub reporter at a big-city newspaper, talks his way into a plum assignment: Covering baseball's "World's Series." In 1890, this is a contest between two leagues depleted by a rival Players' League. Doug becomes embroiled in intrigues to bring down or support this player-owned venture--by people who live in his world, and agents from the future. Two universes would be created from the Players' League's success and failure, and the latter future wants to "de-exist" the former future by making the League's failure an absolute certainty. Doug works with an agent from the endangered future, to save her and billions of other people. This unfolds during Series games between Louisville and Brooklyn, meetings in New York that could doom the Players' League, and against a backdrop of the United States on the brink of empire building, facing the challenge of suffragettes, threatened by robber barons and anarchists, and in which Grover Cleveland, who won and then lost presidential elections, might run again for the land's highest office.