Long-time St. Louis sports journalist and Affton resident Rob Rains doesn’t usually see his name attached to works of fiction, but the subject of his first novel and latest book – the Chicago Cubs – required just that.

“The Curse: Cubs Win, Cubs Win … or Do They?” follows a present-day Cubs team as they attempt to overcome tragedy and avoid adding their names to the long list of so-called curses plaguing their franchise’s history.

“It actually started with an idea about writing a book about what would happen to a major league team if their plane crashed,” explained Rains. “That would be the ultimate curse of a franchise … who better for that to happen to than the Cubs? And then it all kind of mushrooms out of that idea.”

While the plane crash is a major moment in the book, the story primarily focuses on the aftermath, following the team as they come together after the disaster and the investigation of the mysterious crash.

For Rains, the novel was more of a challenge than anything he had previously done. The author of 28 non-fiction sports books, baseball beat writer for 32 years and current journalism professor at Webster University, he said his experience was eased due to the book’s content.

“The majority of the books I’ve written have been about baseball, and there is a lot of actual Cubs history in the book, so the fictional story – the spine of the story – wraps around that real Cubs history.

“I think the fact we’re doing baseball and the fact that we still had some accurate, historically correct context to put it in made it an easier transition than if I totally came up with something that I knew nothing about.”

Rains actually found fiction “kind of fun,” as he could ditch the tape recorder and transcribing required for sports reporting and non-fiction. One of the best benefits? The players finally said what he wanted them to say.

“You didn’t have to make sure you have the quote exactly right, you could make it up to whatever you wanted it to be,” said Rains, who cautioned that he wouldn’t advocate such advice to his journalism students at Webster. “So it was kind of more of a freedom in writing than in a lot of cases in the non-fiction books.

“So much of it, you know, the player dialogue and the manager dialogue, and stuff like that, I could actually hear myself asking that question and getting the response that I probably would have liked to receive from a player … I had to catch myself sometimes almost laughing when I was doing that part,” he continued.

While there was a challenge in entering into fictional writing, determining the subject of the story was an easy selection, even for a veteran reporter of St. Louis baseball.

“It had to be the Cubs,” Rains said. “The fictional story could have worked with any team, but we wanted to include everything that had happened to the Cubs franchise, with the curse of the Billy Goat and a couple other things that happened.”

Rains collaborated with former Cardinal player Andy Van Slyke in co-authoring “The Curse.” The two have worked together before, co-hosting a radio show on KFNS-550 AM.

“I’ve known Andy since he came up as a rookie for the Cardinals in 1983,” Rains said. “It made it easy. I knew how he thought, what he said … so we didn’t have to get to know each other before that.”

Both Rains’s and Van Slyke’s extensive backgrounds in baseball allowed the players, managers and reporters to come to life, speaking and acting like true major leaguers.

“Andy was very important as far as the dialogue between the players and what a player would be thinking in different situations – on the plane, on team buses, back in the clubhouse,” Rains said.

Tapping into his own history as a journalist, Rains channeled how the reporter in the book “would be doing his job or what he would be thinking about.”

The promotional tours of the book have returned positive reviews, in both Chicago and St. Louis. With a book about their home team’s plane crashing, Rains and Van Slyke expected the worst from the actual Cubs organization.

“We thought their reaction would be ‘We can’t believe you had the team’s plane crash!’ That was where we expected to get resistance from the Cubs was about the plane crash, they were more concerned about the fact that we were talking about the curse. That kind of surprised us.”

St. Louis fans have enjoyed the book. A release party at Joe Buck’s restaurant downtown brought a few fans asking: “Why the Cubs?” Most walked away satisfied. Even readers with little interest in baseball found something to like, said Rains.

“We’ve had a lot of people who’ve read the book already, who were not great baseball fans, tell us they simply enjoyed the story part of the book.” Particularly the mystery surrounding the team plane’s supposed accidental crash.

The West County Mall Barnes and Noble will host Rains for a book signing on Oct. 23, and additional book signings are in the works but dates and times have yet to be set.

While proud of his first novel, Rains didn’t convince himself curses exist in baseball, though his outlook for the Cubs still remains bleak. What will come first, a “Curse” film, a second novel or a Cubs World Series?

“I hope the movie. You don’t have to worry about the Cubs (in a series) any time soon,” Rains said.