Fade-away is an old-time baseball term for the pitch that is now called a screwball.

My novel, The Fade-away, revolves around a washed-up, ex-Big League pitcher —a Native American named Jack Dobbs— who emerges, half-drowned, from a backwater of San Francisco Bay in April, 1900.

Dobbs, nicknamed "The Chief," begins to lead a ragtag team of locals to victory, but he does so by cheating, and that's what makes The Fade-away different from most sports tales. It's about ethics. It's about greed. It's about America on the edge of modernity.