1.5 stars, rounded up simply because I actually finished the book. 
 Very meh, and frankly disappointing for such a master of the short story. 
 This was actually two works: Blockade Billy and a short called Morality. BB was better than Morality, but not by very much. 
 I suspect I might have appreciated BB more if I were a baseball fan, as it seemed very much like a love song to the game. My problem with it--and with Morality as well--was that the actual stories, and the driving forces behind them--were so incredibly shallow that the only way King was able to generate suspense was by deliberately withholding information from the reader that all the viewpoint characters already had. Little drives me crazier than that; it's cheap and it's lazy and it's manipulative and writers only need rely on such tactics when they have absolutely nothing else of worth with which to keep people turning pages. If the viewpoint characters lack information too, then fine, I have no problem at all discovering things along with them. But this way? Not cool. 
 And really, even for short stories, they were incredibly thin on substance. That super-seekrit long-withheld information in Blockade Billy turned out to be so perfectly average and boring that I'd originally dismissed it as a possibility during my speculation because I simply didn't think King would be so banal. 
 Morality actually suffered from the same problem of banality, but beyond that, it suffered from constriction. It was a very short story that probably should have been at least a novella, or possibly a book. What we were left with was an outline, where the characters arced from major change to major change with no clear internal motivations or impetus. I mean, the spark that set off the changes was clear, but the characters essentially went from point A to point Z without stopping at ANY of the points in between to show us how they got to Z or why. Which made everything feel orchestrated and artificial, and left me completely unable to connect to the characters after the starting spark happened. The ending was so rushed I was left with whiplash. 
 I do not recommend this book at all. Just plain lazy. Lazy lazy lazy. It feels half-written. Leave it on the shelf.