Actor Daniel Stern positively does not seem set for a shining career as a director after this fairly agonising debut behind the cameras with a sporting fantasy about a 12-year-old kid (Thomas Ian Nicholas) who becomes a dynamite baseball pitcher after a broken-arm accident 'fuses his tendons with his humerus'.

Subsequent developments are quite ingeniously worked out, but director Stern encourages all the cast to mug shamelessly, setting them an example himself with some painfully rampant over-acting in an all-too-high profile cameo role.

Gary Busey, looking just like Nick Nolte in this one, does his best to calm things down a bit as the veteran pitcher who takes the kid under his wing, and John Candy appears unbilled (one of the film's few wise decisions) as an excitable commentator.

Pretty bad.