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The Greatest Game Ever Pitched: Juan Marichal, Warren Spahn, and the Pitching Duel of the Century

Review

The Greatest Game Ever Pitched: Juan Marichal, Warren Spahn, and the Pitching Duel of the Century

These days, a manager is thrilled if he can get a "quality start" out of a pitcher: six innings with no more than three earned runs. Gone are the days of 25 complete games in a season by a single hurler; you're lucky if you can get 25 games from the entire staff. So it's almost unfathomable for modern fans to conceive of a game with not one, but two premiere pitchers going mano-a-mano for 16 thrilling innings.

"Kaplan, a veteran baseball author, depicts the tension and fatigue --- both physical and mental --- as the game edges along..."

Those were the days, writes Jim Kaplan in THE GREATEST GAME EVER PITCHED, as he dissects the 1963 contest that featured two future Hall of Famers on the mound: 43-year-old Warren Spahn of the Milwaukee Braves and the San Francisco Giants' Juan Marichal, some 18 years his junior.

Kaplan, a veteran baseball author, depicts the tension and fatigue --- both physical and mental --- as the game edges along, with any mistake on the mound likely to end the festivities. Unfortunately for Spahn, it was he who succumbed, yielding a home run to Willie Mays in the final frame for the 1-0 loss.

As an example of just how powerful these two teams were, 14 of the 18 players in the starting lineup were All-Stars at some point in their careers. And in addition to Spahn, Marichal and Mays, four more would end up in Cooperstown --- Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews for the Braves, and Willie McCovey and Orlando Cepeda for the host Giants. So this is no weak-hitting expansion franchise misfits here.

The author delves deeply into the back stories for Spahn and Marichal. Each had to deal with financial difficulties growing up, the older man during the Great Depression, the younger in the Dominican Republic. Spahn, who was in the 19th year of a 21-year career, had served in World War II with distinction, receiving a purple heart for wounds suffered in Germany. He lost three prime years to the War, returning to baseball at the age of 25.

Although Marichal did not serve in the military, he had battles of his own to deal with, primarily the double-edge sword of racism faced by Hispanic players. On top of being treated as poorly in many venues as their African-American counterparts, Marichal and teammates such as Felipe Alou, Jose Pagan and Cepeda had the additional yoke of language and cultural issues that were exacerbated even by their own manager, who demanded they speak only English in the Giants' clubhouse.

As illuminating as the dual biographies are, however, they detract from the purported purpose of the book: to pay tribute to the endurance and accomplishments in that single amazing game that will probably never be duplicated. (In fact, if all the pages containing actual game information were tallied, they would probably account for less than a third of the total content.) This is not to say that Spahn's and Marichal's stories don't deserve to be told, but it's too much when you're promoting the "pitching duel of the century" angle.

Footnote for the sake of accuracy: I'm not sure exactly what criteria Kaplan used in decided that the Spahn-Marichal game, as obviously impressive as it was, qualified as the "duel of the century," but it bears noting that on May 1, 1920, Leon Cadore of the Brooklyn Robins (later known as the Dodgers) and Joe Oeschger of the Boston Braves went the distance for their teams in a 1-1 tie that was called after 26 innings.

The Greatest Game Ever Pitched: Juan Marichal, Warren Spahn, and the Pitching Duel of the Century
by Jim Kaplan

  • Publication Date: February 1, 2011
  • Hardcover: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Triumph Books
  • ISBN-10: 1600783414
  • ISBN-13: 9781600783418