Backstop: A Baseball Love Story in Nine Innings

by J. Conrad Guest

Backstop plays the catcher’s position for any team in any city in America with a major league ball club. You cheer him when he delivers, and boo him when he doesn’t. Told in his own words during the seventh game of the World Series in what could be his last game after fourteen years in the major leagues, Backstop chronicles his rookie season, takes the reader to Chicago where he finds romance, and reveals his heartbreak in the aftermath of an adulterous affair. Cheer for Backstop on and off the field as he plays the most important game of his career—haunted by the ghost of his father who passed away before Backstop achieved stardom—and fights to win back the heart of the woman he loves more than the game.

190 pages, Paperback

Published December 8, 2016

About the author

J. Conrad's first novel, January's Paradigm, was published in 1998. Current Entertainment Monthly in Ann Arbor, Michigan, wrote of January's Paradigm, "Readers will not be able to put it down." He has two other novels based on the Joe January character, One Hot January and January's Thaw.

Backstop: A Baseball Love Story In Nine Innings, was nominated 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".

Apex Reviews hailed The Cobb Legacy, a murder mystery written around the shooting death of baseball legend Ty Cobb's father by his mother, as "... an eye-opening tale of drama, scandal, and intrigue highlighting the living, breathing history of a fatally-flawed, intrepid folk hero."

A Retrospect In Death portends not only a search for the meaning of life, but also seeks to determine why we are as we are: prewired at conception, or the product of our environment?

Set during the golden era of motor racing, 500 Miles To Go follows young Alex Król as he seeks love while making his dream to win the Indianapolis 500 come true.

A World Without Music is speculative fiction set against a backdrop of romance. Can a Gulf War veteran suffering PTSD leave behind his past to find the music that will make his life worth living?

His fiction and essays appear in various online and print publications; Google him.

A critic calls his work "Gritty, entertaining... real. Romance for the non-romantic."