Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Lyons Press, and author John Nogowski for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

Throughout baseball’s history, there have been hitters who couldn’t hit certain pitchers as well as pitchers who struggled to get certain hitters out. It happened to everyone. There are Hall of Fame pitchers who struggled against hitters you’ve probably never heard of. There are Hall of Fame hitters who couldn’t hit pitchers who faded from the limelight. Diamond Duels promised to highlight these rivalries, and it did, sort of.

Nogowski does a terrific job uncovering the stats for rivalries like Babe Ruth vs. Walter Johnson, Ted Williams vs. Bob Feller, Willie Stargell vs. Sandy Koufax, and Tony Gwynn vs. Greg Maddux. He’s pored through stats and boxscores to find these pitchers and hitters who duked it out and what the results were. The problem is that it only takes up a few chapters. After that, Diamond Duels reads like any other baseball book that highlights the great pitchers and hitters of the game. It’s not that it isn’t interesting, but it’s also something any of us who are longtime fans of the game or have read other books about baseball have read before.

He also highlights the rivalries among teammates or players who played at the same time. There are the usual Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris comparisons, and some insight into what it was like for the two players who played for the Yankees at the same time and dealt with the New York press corps.

It’s interesting to read about just how great a pitcher Manny Ramirez was. Being a fan of the Mets and the National League, I didn’t see him play much. After reading this, I wish he had played for the Mets. Nogowski goes back and looks at the career of Christy Mathewson, who was a remarkable pitcher revered in the annals of baseball history, but is unknown to many younger fans.

I think there’s a difference between a rivalry and a duel. Sure, Mantle and Maris were rivals of a sort at the time they played, much like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were. When it comes down to it, the real “duels” in baseball, though, are between the pitcher and the hitter. There may be nine men on the field in defense, but it’s the art of the pitcher who is trying to pick the right ball to throw at the hitter to get him out. Sometimes that means striking him out. More often than not, it means getting him to hit the ball on the ground or in the air for the other players to get him out. It’s a craft, and Nogowski does a great job getting into the craft of pitching and hitting, especially going back to a time before there were all of these metrics out there giving more information to players than they ever had before.

While I enjoyed Diamond Duels, the title felt a little misleading. There are several chapters on the pitchers and hitters who battled it out, but after a while, it gives way to rehashing statistics of pitchers and hitters without getting into the impact they had. Near the end, Nogowski talks about what the game might have been like had managers had more knowledge of the fact that some of their hitters did terribly against certain pitchers and vice versa. Would players have been pulled more often for pinch hitters in clutch situations, or even benched, if a manager had at his fingertips that they performed poorly against that pitcher? The world will never know.