Robert Ellis

My hometown is Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I grew up in a really cool time in the 60s and 70s. My esteem, like everybody else’s, was paper thin so I played my ace which was athletic ability. I could really throw a ball. I became captain of my football and baseball teams at Ottawa Hills High School. I won a full baseball scholarship to Michigan State where I starred and was named College Player of the Year! I signed with the Milwaukee Brewers after my junior season and was in their starting lineup 10 days later against Chicago White Sox! Things happen fast when you overplay your ace! After playing well for about a month (at a new position no less, which is a whole 'nother story) I went into an 0-29 stretch before getting my next hit and was sent to the minors. Now how many guys can say they went 0-29 in the big leagues? Take that out of my lifetime batting average and I did okay, but there it is. Honestly, I had very bad eyes, about 20-250. I wore contact lenses in college and nobody knew it. I had to switch to glasses for night baseball and an astigmatism, but it never really solved the problem. In daytime games I hit well, at night very poorly. I think I was about .365 in the day and about .125 at night. And in those days those lights in Milwaukee were very bad; the old time bulbs. So I played in the minors for 11 years with brief appearances in the big leagues in 1971, and 1974-76, finally quitting in mid-season in Portland, Oregon in frustration. After that mess I went back to college for a psychology degree. Today I’m a marriage and individual counselor and am director of a counseling ministry. On the way I wrote that book with Mike Schmidt, "The Mike Schmidt Hitting Study", and other books. Schmidt and I played against each other in various places, and we knew that we were both very “heady” about hitting and the game in general. It only made sense to corroborate on a book. Actually, we’d both reached the same endpoint in hitting knowledge and could understand each other well. He is fountain of hitting knowledge, and I enjoyed picking his brain during the writing. Now, at this point it is quite clear that my personality type is more of a deep thinker. I’m poor at surface banter and prefer to go deep, which not many are inclined to do. So from there I wrote "Sifting Men: A Woman’s Guide to Analyzing Male Character", a primer on how a woman can select a safe man for marriage. (I sort of gave up all my secrets in that book.) I also wrote several fiction and non-fiction manuscripts which I submitted to various publishers with no luck. I quickly tired of that game. I got an agent but he didn’t have any luck, either. So I accepted the fact that I wasn’t “in the club” and continued to write. Since then I’ve put several manuscripts on Kindle, like “The Mendoza Line” (another semi-autographical baseball book), “God, Gold, and the Floating Axe”, and “The Digger Wells Story”, a book for softball players. Non-fiction include “A Primer on Complete Parenting” and “Smart Cookie’s Kitchen”, a book about living healthy. The last one is "Auschwitz Escape" a WWII story about a Polish boy who takes on the Nazi system. I also have probably a half dozen half-finished manuscripts that may or may not get completed, with new ideas going off all the time. If you read one of my books I sincerely hope you enjoy it. I keep them cheap for that reason. And if you get a chance to review it, that would be really something. Thanks for showing interest.