Special Guests
Orestes Destrade
Building on his various experiences as a player, Orestes Destrade has successfully remade himself into one of the game's more recognizable commentators.
He brings experience to the game of baseball from a variety of perspectives: the farmhand, the rookie, the international star, the franchise fixture, and the media personality. Mr. Destrade played four seasons in the major leagues, and is best known to slightly older fans as the first player to take the first base position for the Florida Marlins franchise in their inaugural 1993 season. Yankee fans will remember him as the farmhand with the misfortune to play the same position as icon Don Mattingly, whose retirement finally enabled the younger player to break into the majors in 1987. Those familiar with the Japanese major leagues will remember his torrid string of three seasons with the Seibu Lions, where he won the league home run title for three consecutive years and the MVP of the 1990 Japan Series for his championship team. Younger fans recognize him as a current commentator ESPN Radio's Sports Nation, and an analyst on Baseball Tonight. Given his varied background in baseball, Mr. Destrade is well-positioned to comment on it from both the player's and the reporter's vantage.
Pete Carino
Dr. Peter Carino is Professor of English at Indiana State University , where he teaches a course in Baseball Literature, as well as courses in both composition and literature. He first discovered baseball as a field of academic inquiry in 1989 when he presented a paper on the architecture of classic ballparks at a meeting of the MMLA, an essay later published as the lead essay in the first issue of Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture. He has since published several essays on baseball novels in Nine and edited three bi-annual anthologies of essays on the game, all titled Baseball/Literature/Culture . These volumes collect papers from the Indiana State Conference on Baseball in American Literature and Culture, the precursor to the MTSU Conference. He has been a guest lecturer in Italy at the Universities of Pisa (1997) and Macerata (2001), where he expanded his rooting and scholarly interests to the Italian leagues. In addition to his work in baseball studies, he is a former director of the ISU Writing Center and a two-time winner of the International Writing Center Association's annual award for best article on writing centers. Other published work includes essays on John Updike, Raymond Carver, and James T. Farrell. A devout fan of the game itself, he is absolutely neurotic regarding the fortunes of the New York Mets but promises not to let their collapse last season affect this season's keynote address.
