Sarah's Game

By Stephan Marlow and Ken White

A Movie Length Tale™ from Aisle Seat Books™.

A hardball TV sports reporter learns the gambling scandal that drove her potential Hall of Fame father from major league baseball was a setup. Teaming with an idealistic sportscaster—her father’s former teammate and her girlhood heartthrob—she sets out to clear her father’s name.9

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aisle Seat Books
• Release date: Oct 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781935655688

Book preview

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A Movie Length

Thriller & Suspense Tale

For Readers

13 and up.

Written by

Stephan Marlow

&

Ken White.

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Lyme, New Hampshire

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Copyright © 2012 Stephan Marlow and Ken White

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-1-935655-68-8

ISBN-10: 1-935655-68-X

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012918882

Published by Aisle Seat Books, an imprint of

GrayBooks LLC

1 Main Street

Lyme, New Hampshire 03768

www.Tales2Film.com

www.AisleSeatBooks.com

Electronic Edition

About Tales2Film™ and Aisle Seat Books™

Read a good movie lately?

Every good movie starts with a script, and every good script tells a riveting story. Long before the actors are chosen and the filming starts, a writer sits down, crafts that story, and submits it for consideration by the producers, directors, and other creative talents in the film industry. It can take a long time. A script may spend years making the rounds before getting the elusive Hollywood green light. If it ever does. Some of the greatest movies ever written are ones that none of us will ever see on the screen.

Tales2Film finds the best of those not-yet-produced tales and brings them to you as Movie Length Tales™ just as the writer envisaged them. Each of the tales in this series has been converted by the script’s writer from the technical shorthand of screenplay format into the familiar prose format you see here, a process called novelization.

These little books are not novels, or even novellas. Think of them as written movies. Like the screenplays they come from, each is presented in real time, written in the present tense to allow you to see the movie’s scenes in your mind’s eye as if they were unfolding on a theater’s screen before you.

So. Here’s a movie. Take your favorite aisle seat and enjoy it.

And when it’s over, take a look at out Featured Previews in the back of this book. Your next Movie Length Tale™ is already here...

Now Showing:

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Thriller & Suspense

Ages 13 and up

Theater lights dim.

Fade in:

An onscreen title: October 1994

Inside the San Francisco Giants’ clubhouse, a champagne cork explodes. Sarah McGraw, an intense teenage tomboy, shakes the bottle and sprays her father, Cracker Jack McGraw, who cradles the National League Pennant trophy.

It’s a dream come true, Jack says to the assembled beat reporters. We all need dreams. In the long run, they’re all we got.

Got any more dreams, Jack? a reporter asks.

Beat the Angels in the Series, Jack replies.

Then Cooperstown! Sarah adds.

Jack throws a soggy towel to Matt Cooper, who snaps Sarah’s butt. She kisses his cheek as he grabs her bottle.

My dream? Write the Great American baseball novel, Matt says. He holds up a brand new ink pen shaped like a baseball bat and winks at Sarah.

How about you, kid? Matt asks Sarah. Still going to be the great crusading journalist?

You bet, she replies.

Matt tosses the champagne bottle to another player, who drops it.

I’m gonna buy me my own island, outfielder Billy Clark shouts. Stock it full of wild game and spend my days hunting.

Billy yanks the jock off his head and slingshots it at a teammate, who dodges it.

Spend more time with my kids. Nothing more important than them, pitcher Mike Walt says.

A weaselly-looking man pulls the jock off his face.

I was the kid they never let play, attorney Jimmy Swift tells the reporters. Someday I’ll call the shots.

Jimmy stumbles against a television set sitting on a table in the corner of the clubhouse. On the screen, a distinguished elderly gentleman wearing a white Stetson hat sits in his wheelchair in the owner’s box. He deals poker and watches the Giants celebrate on TV.

My dream? The only one I ain’t got. My Angels win the Series, California Angels owner Tex Austin mutters to the reporters standing behind the other poker players at the table.

>>

Austin holds up a card and winks at the television monitor. An impeccably-dressed Hispanic man stands in his office, watching Austin’s interview on the left monitor. The Third Inning segment of Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary plays on the center monitor. And Jack McGraw’s interview plays on the right monitor.

And you own mine, Tex, media mogul Robert Sanchez says to the TV.

>>

Sanchez walks up to the television monitor on the right. On the screen, Matt and Sarah join Jack, who hands the trophy to Matt and drapes his jersey around Sarah. Lucky number seven.

The world needs heroes, Jack, a reporter yells out.

Hell, I’m nobody’s hero, he says.

Yeah, right, Sarah says.

THREE WEEKS LATER:

Deep inside her New York television studio, the Sports Mama does her live, shock jock sports thing.

Real-time from New York, the announcer intones. The city with no room for amateurs. It’s time for the Sports Mama."

You heard it first right here, fannies, the Mama says to her unseen audience. On the Mama’s Web.

On the monitor behind the Mama is a head shot of Jack McGraw. The Mama continues:

Superstar ‘Cracker Jack’ McGraw, player-manager of the NL Champion SF Giants, admitted today that he bet on his team to win the World Series.

>>

On banks of TVs behind storefront windows in Times Square, a man exits the Los Angeles Federal Building. He shields his face from the swarm of reporters.

It began with an anonymous tip to the Commissioner’s Office, the Mama continues. And ended when bookie Tony ‘Knuckles’ Pronzini fingered his long-time friend. In return for immunity.

Pronzini’s pimple-scarred face fills the multiple monitors, like the many lenses of a fly’s compound eye.

>>

In the security shack at the gate of a major Hollywood studio, a guard watches a tiny black-and-white TV. Jack McGraw faces a bank of microphones. He toys with a rabbit’s foot.

I got a problem, McGraw states to the camera. But it ain’t with lying. Yeah, I placed the bet. Maybe someday you’ll understand.

>>

Sarah sits alone in Jack’s office inside the Giants’ clubhouse. She wears his jersey and stares at the TV. She fights tears. She clutches Jack’s rookie baseball card.

>>

On the dusty countertop of a New York deli, a black-and-white TV broadcasts images of the National League President exiting his office.

NL President Bill White immediately suspended McGraw, the Mama continues. "Indefinitely, pending further review. Just days before