Rob Ruck, Senior Lecturer in the History Department at the University of Pittsburgh, is the author of Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh, The Tropic of Baseball: Baseball in the Dominican Republic, Rooney: A Sporting Life, and the recently released Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game. His documentary work includes Kings on the Hill: Baseball's Forgotten Men, which won an Emmy for Cultural Programming, and The Republic of Baseball: Dominican Giants of the American Game. He was on the committee that elected eighteen players from the Caribbean and the Negro Leagues to the Hall of Fame in 2006 and recently served as an advisor for Viva Beisbol, the permanent exhibit on Latinos at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. An undergraduate at Yale University, who did his doctoral work at the University of Pittsburgh, Rob lives in Pittsburgh with his wife Maggie Patterson, his co-author for the Rooney book.

"In the Dominican Republic . . . baseball reigns supreme. San Pedro de Macorís, on the island’s southeast coast, has produced more major league ballplayers per capita than any other town in the world. According to former big leaguer Pedro Gonzalez, ‘Every boy grows up with a bat and a ball—it’s the first present a male baby gets in his crib.’ . . . Ruck offers not only the flavor of Dominican baseball but a spirited and carefully crafted account of the past and present of this complicated game. . . . A rarity in sports history."—Journal of American History