Rob Rains is a former National League beat writer for USA Today's Baseball Weekly and for three years covered the St. Louis Cardinals for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat until its collapse in the 1980s. He was awarded the Freedom Forum Grant to teach Journalism for a year at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State. Rains has been writing books, magazine articles, and doing radio for the past 10 years. He is based in St. Louis, Missouri. Rains has written or co-written 29 books, most on baseball, including autobiographies or biographies of Mark McGwire, Ozzie Smith, Jack Buck, Red Schoendienst, and Dave Phillips. Rains is also the co-author of The Curse: Cubs Win! Cubs Win! Or Do They? which he wrote with former St. Louis Cardinal Andy Van Slyke. The Curse is a novel that describes a tragic plane crash that kills almost the entire Chicago Cubs roster, and the new players that soldier on to take the Cubs to their first World Series in decades. Rains is also the author of James Naismith: The Man Who Invented Basketball, co-written with Naismith's granddaughter Hellen Carpenter.