Rick Swaine
Lifelong baseball player and fan who writes fiction and nonfiction exploring major events in baseball history.
About Rick Swaine
Rick grew up in Miami, Florida and is a graduate of Florida State University. A semi-retired Certified Public Accountant and Florida Supreme Court Certified Family Mediator, he has been a rabid baseball fan since the age of nine and still plays the game in age appropriate leagues and tournaments throughout the southeast.
Read our review of his latest, Do It for Chappie, here.
BOOKS:
Beating the Breaks: Major League Players Who Overcame Disabilities (2004)
The Black Stars Who Made Baseball Whole: The Jackie Robinson Generation in the Major Leagues (2006)
The Integration of Major League Baseball: A Team by Team History (2009)
Baseball’s Comeback Players: Forty Major Leaguers Who Fell and Rose Again (2014)
Do It for Chappie: The Ray Chapman Tragedy (2019)
Your biggest literary influencers:
John R. Tunis, “the inventor of the modern sports story.” Tunis’ first book The Kid from Tompkinsville (1940) was the first book I ever voluntarily read. It opened my eyes to the pleasure of reading at a young age. John Grisham is my favorite current author with a style that I admire and try to emulate.
The book that changed your life:
The Pitch That Killed by Mike Sowell (1989). Mike authored an excellent non-fiction account of the circumstances surrounding the death of Ray Chapman. I found the story so riveting that I sought a way to make it more appealing to casual sports fans. It took almost 30 years before I eventually hit on the idea of telling the story as an historical novel through the eyes of the true life characters involved as they were known to history.
Currently working on:
A nonfiction work about the makeup of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Words to live by:
You don’t quit playing when you get old – you get old when you quit playing.
Advice for aspiring authors:
Don’t do it just for the money.