Sandor Courane and four other up-and-coming sf writers are snagged from their hotel at a 1979 convention in New Orleans only to wake up the next morning as five insignificant major league ballplayers in 1954—and the aging Sandor is hitting only .221.
I felt angry. I wanted to show that kid, but there wasn’t anything I could show him, with the possible exception of sentence structure.

Variants

(1)
  1. “The Pinch-Hitters” by George Alec Effinger, in Asimov’s Science Fiction, May 1979.
  2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by George Alec Effinger