At her grandparents' North Carolina mountain home during the summer of 1963, eleven-year-old Annie Winters, grief-stricken by the death of her newborn sister and isolated by her mother's deepening depression, finds comfort in holding an oblong stone "rock baby" and in the friendship of a neighbor boy and a reclusive mountain woman with a devastating secret.

An alcoholic, failed attorney is reduced to ambulance chasing. A friend gives him a supposedly easy malpractice case which becomes a last chance to redeem himself and his career.

Fifth-grader Scotty Smalls has just moved into town with his parents. The local kids call him a Dork because he can't even throw a baseball. That changes when the leader of the neighborhood gang recruits him to play on the nearby sandlot field. It's the beginning of a magical summer of baseball, wild adventures, first kisses, and fearsome confrontations with the dreaded Beast and its owner who live behind the left field fence. Soon nine boys have...