Due to a case of mistaken identity, the coach for America's all-star team is Felix Farley, whose record is the Little League equivalent of the Chicago Cubs. Losing his regular players to scarlet fever, vacation and parental punishment, Felix is forced to use a player's sister, the local bully, a college student's dog and a mix of other unlikely players to take on the Russian team in a game that could avert World War III.

"Sandlot Summit" is essentially a younger version of "Rocky IV's" epic battle between Rocky Balboa and Ivan Drago, a surrogate war mixed with the tradition of a ragtag team against all odds. Fishman goes through the conventional approach to construct the story, moving through the picking of teammates to the rocky process of working together to a tensely fought game that clearly portrays our heroes as the underdogs.

And, for the most part, "Summit" does its job. The scenes of the game show a fair command of playing the game, and the mix of players added to the team means that there is room for the scenes to go in entertaining directions. A few factors do grate on the book, mostly due to the one-dimensional nature of several characters: Coach Farley is really quite a loser, "BoneFace" is deformed in the manner of a James Bond villain and one player's mother is an almost offensive Italian stereotype.

One rocky attempt at humor comes when the book attempts to date itself, showing how naïve characters are about the world 20 years later. O.J. Simpson, Tonya Harding and Pete Rose are all shown as heroes to young children, while President Reagan's emissary is none other than George W. Bush - of whom it's said "children of celebrities never amount to anything." It's not exactly subtle, but the jokes will likely go over the heads of younger readers.