In the late 1980s, Travis Lembeau, a freshman catcher trying to make his college baseball team, meets Nicholas "Pooch" Shepherd, a brilliant, ambidextrous pitching prodigy. The two become fast friends and decide to work out together to earn a spot on the rotation. But Pooch has a love of the drink and a talent for sabotage, and one cool February night in 1989, he embarks on a night of drunken violence that leaves Travis in the hospital. Almost a decade has passed, and the two have gotten on with their lives. Travis has married his college sweetheart and works for a small-town newspaper, and Nick Shepherd, no longer calling himself Pooch, is a recovering alcoholic, ten years sober, who cares for his ailing mother and teaches baseball to the local kids. It would seem that the terrible days of Pooch are long gone ... but sometimes the past is never where you think you left it. Through a quantum anomaly, the demon that Nick used to be--the vicious Pooch circa 1989--claws its way across the portals of time to stalk Travis and harass his family. After Travis suffers another beating at Pooch's hands, he fears the worst--that Nick has fallen off the wagon and returned to his violent ways. But Nick is still very much sober and has an even greater reason for concern. For if this thing really is Pooch, if Pooch has somehow come out of the past to torment the present, then every atrocity committed by Pooch will leave a trail leading back to Nick. Working together and apart, and enlisting the aid of a mysterious time-traveling transient, Travis and Nick set out to stop Pooch and send him back to where he came from ... before Pooch's madness destroys everything they love.