During the Summer of 1961, the sports world watches as Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris race to break Babe Ruth's home run record. In the semi-rural South, a boy, "almost twelve"--caught in the middle of his parents' disintegrating marriage--and a disenchanted preacher, who has left the ministry and opened a country store/gas station near the boy's home, begin to follow the home run race and form a bond, and Preacher Jack becomes one of those people who touches a life only briefly, but whose influence lingers for a lifetime.