The Natural is a 1952 book about baseball by Bernard Malamud. It was made into a 1984 movie starring Robert Redford. The hero is Roy Hobbs, a baseball prodigy whose career is sidetracked when he is shot. Most of the novel concerns his attempts to get back into baseball later in life. The fictional team he plays for is the New York Knights, and his legendary bat is called Wonderboy.
The movie is not considered very faithful, as its ending bears no relationship to the ending of the book.