J. Conrad Guest is the author of Backstop: A Baseball Love Story in Nine Innings, as well as The Cobb Legacy, 500 Miles to Go, A Retrospect in Death, A World Without Music, One Hot January, January’s Paradigm, and January’s Thaw. Backstop was nominated as a 2010 Michigan Notable Book, while the Lewis Department of Humanities at the Illinois Institute of Tech­nology adopted it as required reading for their spring 2011 course, “Baseball: America’s Literary Pastime.”