Cieradkowski: Claro Duany, The Giant
From SABR member Gary Cieradkowski Jr. at The Infinite Baseball Card Set on January 20, 2016:
When I was doing the press for my book “The League of Outsider Baseball“, one of the most often-asked questions was which chapter was my favorite. That was tough question – I liked them all for different reasons. “The Bad Guys” was chock-full of great stories like murderer Blackie Schwamb and “The Odd Balls” had Victory Faust. “The Bush Leaguers” featured some of my best research with the story of Lou Gehrig’s summer playing in New Jersey under an assumed name and “The Could Have Beens” had the too-good-to-be-true Steve Dalkowski. Yet when pressed I inevitably said my favorite was “The International Game”. In that chapter I was able to tell the stories of all the players who spread the game throughout the world – Cuba, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, Russia, Japan… I guess I really gravitated towards these players because their stories were often overlooked in the big-picture of baseball history. Despite the dozens of players I put into that chapter, I had many more I just couldn’t fit in because the book would have been twice the size of its eventual 240 pages. One of the guys who had to be cut was Claro Duany, the 4-time batting champ of two different countries…
Read the full article here: http://infinitecardset.blogspot.com/2016/01/211-claro-duany-giant.html
Originally published: January 25, 2016. Last Updated: January 25, 2016.