About the Author

Mike Sowell is former sports writer and the author of three baseball books, two of which were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. He grew up in Houston, where he followed the Houston Colt .45s/Astros and attended the first league game played in the Astrodome on Opening Day 1965. After graduating from the University of Oklahoma, Sowell served two years in the U.S. Army, where he was sports editor and then editor of the Berlin Observer, a community newspaper. Sowell was a newspaper sports writer in Texas before joining The Tulsa Tribune, where he was an award-winning sports columnist and sports editor before the paper's demise in 1992. His first book, The Pitch That Killed, was published in 1989 and was the winner of the CASEY Award for best baseball book of the year as well as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. July 2, 1903: The Mysterious Death of Hall of Famer Big Ed Delahanty was published in 1992, and One Pitch Away, also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, in 1995. Sowell also was the writer for Cardtoons, a series of baseball parody cards that poked fun at the greed and temperamental behavior of the players and owners in Major League Baseball. The cards were scheduled to be released in 1994, but instead became the focus of a lawsuit against the Major League Baseball Players' Association, which attempted to block their publication. Cardtoons eventually won the case based on its First Amendment right to parody. The cards were released in 1996, with Cardtoons v. The MLBPA becoming a significant media law case, still featured in several legal books and publications. Sowell later received a master's degree from Oklahoma State University and spent 15 years on the faculty at the university's School of Journalism & Broadcasting, later the School of Media & Strategic Communications. He was inducted into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame in 2007. He now is retired and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with his wife, Ellen, and his dog, Chappie.