In Diamond Duels: Baseball's Greatest Matchups, we take a magnifying glass to some of the game's most entertaining and historic battles between hitters and pitchers, played out over breezy spring evenings, hot summer afternoons, and chilly fall evenings as the long, rumbling baseball season finally winds down. Then we look closer.
Did you know that over their 20-plus year careers, Hall of Famers Stan Musial and Warren Spahn matched up against each other a staggering 356 times and that Musial blasted 15 of his 475 career home runs off the Braves' lefty? You can bet Spahn knew that, probably kept count. Probably also had unprintable thoughts about each and every one.
As a sport with such a rich and diverse history, baseball offers us a long and fascinating recounting of so many of those dramatic matchups - if you know where to look. There are many untold stories inside the box scores; Duke Snider slamming 19 home runs off Robin Roberts, who must have groaned every time he saw No. 4 at the plate; a starry-eyed National League star Dizzy Dean finally getting to pitch to American League folk hero Babe Ruth, winding down his career with the Boston Braves; Yankees manager Casey Stengel deciding not to start left-handed ace Whitey Ford in some key moments throughout Ford's Hall of Fame career; Albert Pujols doing his best to upset those careful pregame pitching strategy sessions by going out and swatting a record 154 of his 703 career blasts in his very first at-bat of the game.
Diamond Duels is a book for the old and the young baseball fan, those who want to know just a little bit more about those dramatic matchups between pitcher and hitter throughout the games of our lives as well as those who want to look back, find out something they hadn't thought of, enriching their everlasting baseball memories.
