"Diamond Duels" digs in deep
Nogo's new baseball book is out March 4!
“Diamond Duels” my brand new book which will be released by Lyons Press on March 4. Just in time for the 2025 baseball season.
“Diamond Duels” is an in-depth look at some of baseball’s historic matchups, taking a magnifying glass to the age-old box scores and highlight reels to find out how Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb did facing Walter Johnson, how did Hank Aaron fare against Don Drysdale, what was Christy Mathewson doing covering the 1919 World Series and all sorts of other fascinating baseball arcana.
These days there isn’t a statistic that managers, players, pitchers, coaches don’t know. For the longest time, it wasn’t that way. Frank Robinson said the first thing he’d do when he got up was go get the newspaper to see who was pitching that night.
Most teams paid no attention to matchups, not statistically anyway, A Boston Red Sox manager had no qualms about sending Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski up to the plate in the 9th, the team trailing, standing in against lefty reliever Darold Knowles, not knowing Yaz was a dismal 2-for-26 (.077) against him.
Similarly, sportswriters and commentators back in the day never really wondered why Casey Stengel always seemed to be starting Whitey Ford against the White Sox and not the Red Sox. Whitey had 73 career starts vs. Chicago, only 42 vs. archrival Boston. Can you imagine the Yankees visiting Fenway for a big series and no Ford?
Nobody ever counted how many times Braves’ Hall of Famer Warren Spahn groaned when he saw No. 6 in Cardinal red, slinking in the back corner of the batter’s box. Stan had a whopping 356 lifetime trips to the plate against Spahnie, took him deep 15 times, hit .321. Stan could hit Sandy Koufax (.342), Robin Roberts (.384) and Don Newcombe (.349) but not Sam “Toothpick” Jones, a Negro League star who held Stan to a sad .122 average!
“Diamond Duels” is the second baseball book I’ve done. We issued a second edition of “Last Time Out” in 2022, a collection of stories about the final MLB games of 43 all-time greats as well as the first major-league game of my son, John, who played first base for the St. Louis Cardinals and Pittsburgh Pirates in 2020 and 2021.
Happy reading, friends!
