Duke Snider - The "Duke of Flatbush"

Duke Snider found that in baseball, things even out. Playing in Brooklyn's Ebbets Field with the Dodgers, Duke Snider hit more home runs during the decade of the Fifties than any player in the game, with the help of an easily reachable right field fence. But when the Dodgers relocated to Los Angeles, Duke Snider found himself facing the daunting task of trying to hit the ball 440 feet for a home run. Still, Duke Snider collected over 400 round trippers in an eighteen year long career that culminated with his enshrinement in the Hall of Fame.

Edwin Donald "Duke" Snider was born in 1926 in Los Angeles and grew up in California. An exceptional athlete, Snider was a strong armed quarterback but also excelled at baseball. One of Branch Rickey's many scouts discovered Duke and signed him to a Dodger contract as an amateur free-agent in 1943. After beginning his minor league career, Duke Snider entered the military and then came back in 1946, to resume playing, in Fort Worth, Texas and then in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1947. Snider was called up for parts of the next two seasons with Brooklyn, but did not stick with the big club until 1949, when Rickey hired Hall of Famer George Sisler "to acquaint him with the strike zone". Snider, who was now 22 years old, responded with a breakout year, hitting 23 homers and knocking in 92 runs.

In six of the next seven seasons, Duke Snider had one hundred plus RBI campaigns; he sent 92 runs over the plate in 1952. The short fences in right at Ebbets Field were well-suited to Snider's swing, and during the Fifties he belted 326 home runs. Snider had five seasons in a row of forty or more homers from 1953 through 1957. Known as "The Silver Fox", Duke Snider had 126 runs batted in for the Dodgers in 1953, 130 the next year, and 136 in 1955 when he was named The Sporting News Player of the Year. In the 1952 and 1955 World Series, both against the New York Yankees, Snider hit four home runs, the only man to do this twice. The eight-time All-Star led the National League in homers in 1956 with 43, and he hit better than .300 seven times with a high of .341 in 1954.