BELIEVE:

Lots of executives said no to Shelton and his film. Then he walked into a meeting with Thom Mount, the former Universal studio head. "He knew Lysistrata and he knew the infield-fly rule -- that's a small group to find in Hollywood -- and he owned a piece of the Durham Bulls baseball team in the Carolina League," Shelton writes.

Shelton was a first-time director and didn't yet have a story. "What I did have was three characters who had been living in my head for all the years since I left baseball," he writes, continuing:

"Each was a composite, an archetype, and if I was lucky, an original at the same time. I figured that if the tale was about a ménage à trois, it wouldn't come across as a baseball story. I determined that if the woman was sleeping with one of them but the other one was the right guy, well, you didn't have to understand the infield-fly rule to connect with the drama. If it sounds calculated, it was."

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