Inductees

He spent his youth in the 1960s here in the Ozarks, listening to the St. Louis Cardinals through the static of a transistor radio and, figuring his baseball talent wouldn’t take him far, he thought of another way of reaching the big leagues.

For Rob Rains, if you couldn’t play for them, why not write about them?

“As far as I was concerned,” Rains said, “the only job I ever wanted was to cover the Cardinals.”

Rains succeeded. He is now in his 37^th year as a sports writer, covering his boyhood team through most it, and it’s why the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame is proud to induct the Springfield native with the Class of 2017.

A 1974 graduate of Kickapoo High School, Rains has covered 59 World Series games and more than 30 spring trainings along with three decades of big-league regular seasons.

He worked for United Press International after graduating from the University of Kansas in 1978 and was hired by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1984, becoming the Cardinals’ beat writer the following year.

Rains was hired as the National League beat writer for USA Today’s Baseball Weekly when the newspaper launched in 1991, taught journalism at Arizona State University and Webster University and now is back covering the Cardinals for STLSportsPage.com. Along the way, he has written 33 books, most with a Cardinals theme, including the autobiographies of Ozzie Smith and Jack Buck.

“It was a dream come true,” Rains said. “People would say, ‘Oh, you’ve got to go to work.’ I would say, ‘No, I’m going to a ballgame.’”

Rains grew up in an era when video games didn’t exist and baseball was unquestionably America’s No. 1 sport. Like many in the Ozarks, he listened daily to the Cardinals radio broadcasts.

“My first World Series memory was in 1964. I was in the third grade and (his class) found out that we weren’t going to watch the game,” said Rains, who admits he faked an illness so he could go home.

His mother, however, said if he was too sick to go to school he was too sick to watch television. He decided that day to become a sports writer, with his goal of covering the Cardinals.

Then, going to games and watching them, and writing about them, would be his job.

As he became a teenager, Rains worked for the school newspaper and also assisted local sports media.

“(Larry) Hazelrigg and Anvil Welch let me hang out at the News-Leader. I bugged Ned (Reynolds) to let me hang out at Channel 3,” Rains said. “I just fell in love with it.”

Others became influential, too, such as professor Suzanne Shaw at the University of Kansas, where Rains became the sports editor of the student-run, five-day-a-week newspaper.

That’s where he began building toward the Cardinals beat, and jobs that would send him around the country writing about the sport he loved.

There were some dark days, however, including when the Globe folded in 1986.

“Had the Globe not folded, I am convinced I would still be covering the Cardinals there,” Rains said. “But it led me to a lot of other opportunities like the job with Baseball Weekly. It happened for a reason.”

Rains covered it all. It was his byline on the breaking story of the Cardinals acquiring Jack Clark – a story that other media outlets had no choice but to credit, given the internet was still a decade away and social media was almost 30 years from becoming a powerhouse.

Among notable stories was a 1993 Baseball Weekly offseason feature on Mitch Williams, the Philadelphia Phillies closer who had coughed up the World Series-winning home run to Toronto’s Joe Carter.

Eventually, Rains authored That’s A Winner! a few years after he was to work as Buck’s assistant on CBS Baseball broadcasts.

“In 1996, I walked back in the clubhouse and it was the first time I had seen Jack in about two years,” Rains said. “The first thing he said was, ‘So when are we going to do that book?’”

Rains worked for a time as the communications manager for the Missouri Athletic Club while also working on various books that kept him connected to the Cardinals. He and his wife of 35 years, Sally, are parents to B.J., a sports writer in Idaho, and Mike, who runs social media for Rawlings.

“My favorite memories are of the people I have covered – players, managers, general managers, scouts, front office people — and other writers,” Rains said. “I can’t imagine doing anything else.”