The match was fiercely contested, as evidenced by W. G. Grace's gamesmanship in running out the naïve 21-year-old Sammy Jones, who had been batting well with his captain.
Janet Maslin of The New York Times noted that the screenplay "wittily affords the director a great many opportunities for a brand of gamesmanship that enlivens the film without trivializing it. Mr. Rivette is able to sustain a complex, shifting relationship between the real and the theatrical without losing the film's overriding sense of fun."
Mead's best known book has no plot; it is a satire of an instructional manual, very similar in form and subject matter to Stephen Potter's Gamesmanship.