David Nemec

David Nemec (born December 10, 1938) is an American baseball historian, novelist and playwright.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Nemec spent most of his adolescence in Bay Village, Ohio. In his senior year of high school he was named the first winner of the prestigious Ed Bang scholarship, created to honor the "Dean of American Sports Writers." Nemec subsequently played outfield and first base for Ohio State University while earning a BA in English (graduating in 1960). After serving in the army, he taught and coached in Cleveland public schools while working on a novel about the Sam Sheppard murder case, which occurred in his hometown of Bay Village. Sheppard had been Nemec’s family physician prior to his 1954 conviction for his wife’s slaying, which was later overturned.

Nemec moved to New York City with his first wife, the visual artist Vernita Nemec (aka Vernita N’Cognita) in 1965. In 1967 he won a Transatlantic Review award for his first published story, "On the Produce Dock".

Throughout the 1970s Nemec worked as a parole officer in the Youthful Offender Bureau with the New York State Division of Parole while he continued to publish stories, two of which gained citations in The Best American Short Stories. The parole experience later provided the backdrop for Nemec’s second novel, Mad Blood, based loosely on the 1963 Wylie-Hoffert murder case.

In August 1973, Nemec was awarded the first of several residencies he was to spend at Yaddo, the artists’ and writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Following his second Yaddo stay in 1975, Nemec drew on his vast knowledge of baseball history to create The Absolutely Most Challenging Baseball Quiz Book, Ever (Macmillan, 1977), it launched a series of popular Nemec baseball quiz books.

Toward the end of the 1970s, Nemec returned to fiction, publishing his first novel, Bright Lights, Dark Rooms. He has since published seven more novels.

During the 1990s, Nemec expanded on the research he had done for his historical baseball novel, Early Dreams, to become a scholar on baseball’s infancy as a professional sport. Since 1987, Nemec has authored or co-authored over 20 books on baseball, many focusing on the game’s embryonic years. In 1994, Lyons & Burford published The Rules of Baseball, Nemec’s anecdotal look at the evolution of the rules of the game. The following year the same publisher brought out his The Beer and Whisky League, a history of the American Association during its ten-year existence (1882–1891) as a rebel major league. In 1997, Donald I. Fine Books published Nemec’s The Great Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Major League Baseball. The book was updated and expanded and reissued in 2006 by the University of Alabama.

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