Baseball is a team sport. But a local writer has focused on baseball's great one-on-one matchups between pitchers and hitters.
John Nogowsky considers himself a knowledgeable baseball fan. But also admits he's still learning.
"I happened to look at Stan Musial's record and saw he had 356 lifetime at-bats against the great Warren Spahn, the Braves Hall of Fame left-handed pitcher. And I thought, I've been a sportswriter for 25 years, I've been following baseball for maybe 60 years. I never knew that!"
Thus was born the concept for Nogowski's new book, "Diamond Duels."
"So that spurred me to keep looking at this and see what other things I could find from these glory days of baseball when these matchups and these duels were so interesting. I found so many things that were, to me, fascinating that I'd never heard before."
And the results of those epic duels were often unexpected. Some of the game's most celebrated hitters were sometimes brought low by nearly unknown pitchers. And vice versa. And Nogowski believes such drama is unlikely to ever happen again.
"Back in the day, you'd see a pitcher 3, 4, maybe 5 times a game. Nowadays, if you see him twice or three times it's a lot. You just don't have the number of at-bats against these pitchers that you face, so you don't have the kind of history. You don't have the kind of backlog of information that these guys had back in the day and I think it makes the game that much more difficult."
John Nogowski will be releasing "Diamond Duels" this Thursday evening, March 27 at Midtown Reader. Baseball fans - or simply folks who love well-told stories - should enjoy the program. It begins at 6:30.
