About the Author

Jeff Lichtman, the author of Baseball for Rookies, has been a fan of the Oakland Athletics since they moved to the Bay Area in 1968. He has a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He has worked most of his adult life as a software engineer specializing in database systems. When his companies had outings to baseball games, he taught seminars on baseball for beginning fans, making it possible for fellow employees who had no experience with baseball to understand and enjoy what they saw at the ballpark.

In 1993, as a reward for five years of service, Jeff's employer (Sybase, Inc.) gave him a three-month sabbatical. He spent the time seeing a ballgame in each of the twenty-eight Major League ballparks that existed at the time. He wrote a computer program to optimize the route and drove most of it, putting over 17,000 miles on his car. He flew to only two cities, Seattle and Miami, since they are neither close to any other Major League city nor on the way to any Major League city.

To send mail to Jeff Lichtman, please visit the contact page.

In addition to baseball, Jeff also enjoys collecting and remastering 78 RPM records. He has a web site devoted to this hobby called Swazoo Koolak's Web Jukebox.