George Castle is renowned for existing almost simultaneously in multiple baseball eras. He is one of the best multimedia baseball reporters in the game today—and also one of its foremost historians. Castle truly believes past is prologue in baseball.

A lifelong Chicagoan, Castle grew up in the West Rogers Park neighborhood, where he attended Mather High School, and later graduated from Northern Illinois University. He turned an avocation into a vocation. He started paying $1 to get into Wrigley Field’s cheap seats in the 1960s. At the dawn of the 1970s, he began staking out American League games from old Comiskey Park’s most economical vantage points. All the sights and sounds of that era were locked away in his memory bank, and have been brought to life via a series of books; his 15-year-old syndicated weekly baseball radio show, Diamond Gems; his newspaper, magazine, and Internet stories, and even as a producer of baseball broadcast exhibits for the Museum of Broadcast History in Chicago. Present-day big leagues are amazed at his recall and analysis of history when Castle makes his rounds of big-league clubhouses, where he uses a network of close relationships to continually produce scoops and informative stories that outflank other media.

Castle began his career as a Chicago Tribune copyboy as a college freshman in 1974. Soon afterward, he served as researcher for controversial Tribune columnist Gary Deeb’s sports TV-radio columns. Since 1980, he has covered the Cubs, White Sox, and Major League Baseball for a variety of newspapers and magazines. Starting in 1994, he has worked the Cubs and White Sox beats for the Times of Northwest Indiana, the Chicago area’s fourth-largest daily newspaper. During the same period of time, he has hosted and produced the weekly radio magazine show Diamond Gems, which is broadcast on more than 35 affiliates in 12 states and the SLRN Radio Sports internet network, and podcast on the YourSportsFan.com sports site. Diamond Gems specializes in vintage baseball broadcast highlights from Castle’s own archives, featuring hundreds of hours of the greatest announcers in history dating back to the 1930s. Many highlights are extremely rare clips that neither teams nor broadcast outlets possess. Former baseball stars and managers from the last half-century also have been frequent guests on Diamond Gems.

Castle began tracking down former Cubs and recalling their memories of the game in the mid-1980s for the team’s monthly magazine, VineLine, then began a standing column on the ex-players in January 1992, which still runs today. Such work evolved into the long-form version of Castle’s historical work, resulting in nine published books since 1998. His first three books, I Remember Harry Caray; Sammy Sosa: Clearing the Vines; and The I-55 Series: Cubs vs. Cardinals, the latter a history of one of baseball’s top rivalries, were released by Sports Publishing in 1998-99. Next, Castle wrote what he still considers his ultimate work, The Million-To-One Team: Why the Chicago Cubs Haven’t Won the Pennant Since 1945, published by Taylor in 2000. This 350-page hardcover featured a grand, sweeping chronicle of Cubs management and ownership since gum magnate Philip K. Wrigley’s days, sketching out how a lack of management passion and ignorance of basic baseball management techniques condemned the team to its championship drought that now has lasted ninety-eight years.

Other books since then have included Throwbacks: Old School Players in Today’s Game (Potomac Books, 2003); Where Have All Our Cubs Gone? (Taylor, 2005); and Baseball and the Media (University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Where Have All Our Cubs Gone? tracked down forty-one former players, managers, and executives, expanding on Castle’s VineLine work. Meanwhile, Baseball and the Media was praised within the industry as a critical analysis of baseball writing, baseball broadcasting, and sports-talk radio. Castle’s Entangled in Ivy: Inside the Cubs’ Quest for October (Sports Publishing, 2007) was a worthy sequel to The Million-To-One Team. This book covered the entire tenure of Cubs president Andy MacPhail to create an inside-out picture of the franchise in crisis in 2004-06. Cubs players read Entangled in Ivy, liked it and praised it for its accuracy. A similar opinion was offered up by former Cubs president John McDonough, who called Castle after one of his radio appearances promoting the book to request additional copies. In bookstores currently is Castle’s latest work, Sweet Lou and His Cubs (Lyons Press). Again, the author has used his up-close-and-personal access at the ballpark to craft an “inside-baseball” narrative of a legendary manager with his colorful mood swings, along with the players that have uplifted the expectations for a World Series.

Furthering Castle’s baseball historian status was his work as producer of baseball-broadcast exhibits at Chicago’s Museum of Broadcast History. In 2000, he edited highlights—in some cases blending audio, video, and old newsreel footage together—for an interactive exhibit on Jack Brickhouse, the longtime Cubs and White Sox announcer who was a member of the broadcasters’ wing of the Hall of Fame. After that project was completed, Castle put together two-minute highlight montages of all baseball announcers inducted into the museum’s Radio Hall of Fame and assembled the highlights package of a special live program, “An Evening with Jack Buck,” in 2001. Castle also hosted a museum program, featuring the oldest sports videotape known to exist, on the 40th anniversary of Don Cardwell’s 1960 no-hitter against the St. Louis Cardinals. Outside the museum, Castle has done dozens of live talks on baseball history at libraries and community centers throughout the Chicago area since 2003. The author has a built-in platform to promote all his projects via Diamond Gems. Castle has total control over the programming airtime and network commercial inventory, which means he can craft a variety of promotional messages including thirty-second commercials.

Castle lives in Morton Grove with wife Nina, golden retriever Polly, basset hound Abby and 16-year-old African grey parrot Casey, who does a perfect mimic of his voice. Daughter Laura is a Dean’s List student finishing her major in interior architecture at Columbia College-Chicago.