My name is Jimmy Hanks. Until recently, I was a Minor League baseball player for the Dallas Lonestars. Like most young kids, I’ve always dreamed about standing on a Major League field and competing against the greatest ballplayers in the world. This book is about getting there. It’s about the long bus rides through deserted towns, it’s about double-headers, double-plays, errors, homeruns, tryouts, failures and successes. It’s about baseball. It’s about my life, and how a guy who never gets picked first fights to be standing last.

Sitting here in the dugout of Lonestar Park in Dallas, on the night of my first Major League game, I can finally sit back and reflect about how in the world I got here. I guess it all starts on “assignment day” in Kissimmee, the day that everything changed. The day that baseball took second place to survival. And after this day, I would never be the same…