Customer Reviews

Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy

5 star:		(78)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

"On the mound tonight for the Los Angeles Dodgers ... number 32 ... the great left-hander... Sandy Koufax".

These were the energizing words coming over the airwaves that I lived for as a teenager in the mid-60s. I was a Dodger fan. More specifically, a Sandy Koufax fan. I never saw him pitch, but rather relied on the Voice of the Dodgers, Vin Scully, to paint in my mind's eye the picture of my hero at work. So, on September 9, 1965, it was after "lights out" at a private boarding school north of Los Angeles, and I was under the covers with my transistor radio surreptitiously glued to the final inning of Sandy's perfect game against the Chicago Cubs.

Consciously or not, former sportswriter Jane Leavy has constructed SANDY KOUFAX: A LEFTY'S LEGACY much the same as Ed Gruver's year 2000 book, Koufax. In each, the author alternates multiple chapters about Sandy's upbringing, professional career, and post-retirement with chapters that are a batter by batter account of Sandy's greatest diamond triumphs - at one inning per chapter. In Gruver's story, it was the last game of the 1965 World Series against the Minnesota Twins when Koufax pitched with only two days rest, and clinched the Fall Classic with grit and a fastball. In Leavy's, it's the Perfect Game pitched against the Cubs at Dodger Stadium, when Sandy's performance touched the truly sublime.

Based on a wealth of interviews with her subject's friends and former fellow players, Leavy's book provides much more information about Sandy's life and meteoric career than does Gruver's. His Jewishness, the affinity he had with Black players because of it, the racism other players felt towards him during his early years with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and his decision not to pitch the opening game of the '65 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur. His perception of the pure science of pitching, and how he got the rules of physics to work to his advantage. The hard feelings Koufax still harbors against Walter Alston for mismanaging his early career. The disaster that was baseball's system of signing "bonus babies". The assault Koufax and Don Drysdale made on the Reserve Clause of the Uniform Players Contract with their famous salary hold-out before the 1966 season. Indeed, while Leavy's chapters on the Perfect Game are models of coherence, sometimes she gets into trouble in the intervening segments with non-sequiturs that left me thinking, "Uh, come again", and which imparted a certain choppiness to the narrative, as if she had failed to stitch all her information together properly. Examples:

"Koufax, a bachelor, was Doggett's guest on the postgame show every time he pitched and a collector of countless new electrical appliances." OK. So?

On Tommy Lasorda's recollections of his relationship with Koufax: "Once he got going on the subject, Lasorda didn't stop, failing to notice that one of the people to whom he was speaking had doubled over in acute pain with stomach cramps." Who was that and why is it relevant? The author doesn't say.

"The day pitchers and catchers reported (to spring training) was still an occasion observed by tomboys who wore their Mary Janes to school in celebration." Huh? Must be an inside joke.

Beyond these infrequent stumbles, Leavy has crafted a book that will surely delight and absorb anyone wishing to revel in the career of Dandy Sandy. A very nice touch in the chapter about the Perfect Game's 9th inning is a verbatim transcription of Vin Scully's radio play-by-play of the action. I can hear it as if it was only yesterday.

It should be noted that if one is looking for dirt, there isn't any outside of a passing observation indicating Koufax is capable of telling off-color jokes, and evidence that Sandy would occasionally sneak into the players' dorm after curfew during spring training. The adulation is slavish. Perhaps purists will say that this prevents SANDY KOUFAX from being a balanced and great book. On the other hand, in this era of tell-all journalism, maybe it's better not to know the blemishes. Why sully the rare heroes left to us? As Cubs great Ernie Banks thought while watching number 32 walk out to the mound: "It's like being in the ballpark with Jesus."

Yeah, but JC didn't have a 100 mph fastball and a curve that dropped as if off the edge of a table.

Sandy Koufax was a shooting star. A brilliant, explosive wonder, he appeared on the baseball scene of the mid-60's virtually without warning, dominated the game as no lefty ever had and, after a short, extraordinary brilliance, was gone in an instant, leaving behind a grateful, awed and largely befuddled multitude.

Koufax is an extremely private man. He had no role in the preparation of this book. However, Jane Leavy appears to have interviewed virtually everyone who ever knew or worked with Koufax to any significant degree and, through painstaking research has penned the definitive-though totally derivative-biography of Koufax we are likely to ever see.

Unfortunately-and this is no criticism of Leavy, just a reflection of the enigma that is Sandy Koufax-in the end the only truly salient fact that emerges is that Koufax remains as much a mystery today as he was in his prime. Leavey may have conducted over 400 interviews and provided an avalanche of detail, background and speculation but the fact is that Koufax himself remains unavailable, unassailable and, in the final analysis, apparently unknowable. One of his former teammates once observed that "Sandy Koufax is the most misunderstood man in all of baseball". Leavy has, through this entertaining and valiant effort, established that fact to be as true today as it was 35 years ago.

I was a fan of Koufax when he played, but more of a fan of him as a unique human being. Ms. Leavy tells the story of a great pitcher by using the perfect game he pitched in 1965 as the illustration of a great pitcher's skills. However alternating chapters told the story of his rise to greatness both on pitching skill level and on a human scale.

Koufax was a great pitcher but more important a great person. The most revealing fact is that Sandy was not aloof, distant and enigmatic as portrayed by other wrriters. He just eschewed publicly airing his life. He was a great friend, a fair and decent person, and not one to make baseball his whole life.

Ms. Leavy's book is a great read, in fact I could not put it down. I resisted reading it, seeing it as another baseball book, but it was captivating. Sandy Koufax was unique among pitchers but also unique among famous athletes; humble, caring, considerate of fans. I read Gruber's earlier work and this one is much better.

Sandy Koufax was my first athlete hero and I have waited a long time for a definitive bio of him. This is as much of an appreciation of the former Dodger great as it is revealing biography, but it's a wonderful book that I recommend highly. There is a great deal of insight into Koufax and what made him such a pitching marvel. Without saying so directy, we see how even Dodger management didn't know what to make of his being Jewish and I conclude from reading this book that Walt Alston and the Dodgers didn't deserve Koufax. .... Sandy was a tough, competitive as hell pitching God who simply was a nice guy and valued his privacy and ordinariness as much as his career, if not more. He really was and is a class guy who stands out among our star ball players almost as much for that characteristic -- and I say almost -- a he did for his awesome abilities. Organizing the book around his perfect game aganst the Cubs was a masterstroke and if you're a baseball fan and would like to read about an athlete who was also a truly good guy, you'll love this book. The writer did an excellent job with a very difficult subject. Along with Hank Greenberg, Sandy is the Jewish Jackie Robinson and you'll enjoy reading this as much for social commentary as you will for the baseball it captures.

The Koufax story, as we remember it, and as author Jane Leavy depicts it, has some of the trappings of a medieval morality play. A 1954 Brooklyn boy improbably becomes a "bonus baby" with his hometown Dodgers. So wild and unpredictable a hurler, his manager dreaded to use him. He labors six years but never loses faith. Suddenly, in 1961, the fidelity of this Dodger Job is redeemed. He rolls off six years of impeccable performance that earn him a berth in the Hall of Fame. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there is a time for everything, including premature retirement when a left arm becomes irreparably damaged. And then he disappears to a privacy of his own doing.

This is an interesting work that features memory and impression over sabermetrics. Koufax did win eleven games in 1958; he was not exactly a stiff before 1961. And if one looks at the stats closely, he was not that far from his peers even at his best: in his memorable six-season span, 1961-1966, he bested Juan Marichal in wins by a slim 129-124 margin and Don Drysdale by 129-111. [Marichal would win another 113 after Koufax retired.] Thus, the difference between Koufax and his peers like Marichal, Bob Gibson, and Drysdale must lie elsewhere than in sheer statistics. Jane Levy seeks to find that "otherness," focusing upon the atmosphere of postwar Brooklyn, the influence of Judaism upon the pitcher, and the mixed emotions of Koufax and his admirers alike when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles. Leavy captures what stats guru Bill James uses as the ultimate criterion for admission to the Hall of Fame: his contemporaries thought of Koufax as the best at his position.

Koufax's career covered twelve years, much shorter than Marichal's or Warren Spahn's. In retrospect, however, he seemed to have pitched in two different eras of the game. In those grainy black and white films of the 1955 World Series, when Dodger outfielder Sandy Amoros started the mother of all double plays near the left field foul line, a very young Koufax watched from the Dodger bench. He was there the next year to see Larsen's perfect game; he moved with the team to Los Angeles; he pitched in the Coliseum with its "Wally Moon home run porch" and was a member of the 1959 World Series Championship team, posting an 8-6 season record. Aside from winning big in the 1960's, he and Drysdale attempted the first "collective bargaining" strategy and started the ball rolling for Curt Flood and Marvin Miller.

Amazingly during his Brooklyn high school days Koufax was not considered prospective baseball material, and certainly not a pitcher. His sport, ironically, was basketball, and on February 10, 1953, Koufax and his Lafayette High School five [which included a scrappy Alan Dershowitz] embarrassed a New York Knicks team paced by Harry "The Horse" Gallatin and Al McGuire. He might never have attempted organized baseball were it not for a serendipitous encounter with one Milt Laurie, Braves' prospect turned truck driver. Laurie was impressed with the speed of Koufax's delivery, if not his control, and eased him into the world of Brooklyn amateur baseball. Later, at the University of Cincinnati, baseball coach Ed Jucker [yes, that Ed Jucker, better known for his coaching on hardwood floors.] complained that none of his catchers would go near Koufax for fear for life or limb. It is unclear who among the Dodger organization first caught sight of Koufax-though Walter Alston had seen him play basketball at Cincinnati-Al Campanis appears to have spearheaded the recruiting and signed the lefty.

Koufax, as Leavy observed, came to the Dodgers at roughly the same time as Alston. The latter's conservative and basic outlook on the game was never quite at peace with the unpredictable Koufax. Their relationship was tense. Leavy overstates the case when she argues that Alston was flat out afraid to use him-Koufax started 25 games in 1958-but she is correct that the Dodger organization did not know how to manage him. As a result, Koufax developed his unique windup and delivery pretty much on his own. Leavy devotes an entire chapter to his delivery, including kinetic sketches--admirable until one realizes that this very delivery nearly destroyed his left arm. When the reader considers how Leo Mazzoni has nurtured flame-thrower John Smoltz through near twenty profitable seasons, the tragedy of Koufax's shortened career comes into clearer focus.

The Koufax who emerges here is neither a philosopher nor a religious fanatic. He is a competitive but sociable Brooklynite who never totally succumbed to West Coast glitz nor corporate Dodger hubris. His reserve is a genuine humility, a reluctance to trade in on what he considered a physical ability, and should not be confused with the darker shadows of DiMaggio. He was loved by his teammates, and respected [and feared] by the opposition. Thanks to Leavy's extensive search for Koufax contemporaries, there is a plethora of anecdotal material from Ron Fairly, Ken Holtzman, Nate Oliver, Jeff Torborg, Maury Wills, Wes Parker, and Ed Vargo, to name a few. The ultimate in nostalgia is Leavy's reconstruction over nine chapters of Koufax's perfect game of September 9, 1965. Pieced together from a scouting film, a boy's tape recording of the radio broadcast, and memories of the participants, Leavy recounts one of baseball's greatest pitching duels, between the perfect Koufax and the near perfect Bob Hendley of the Cubs. It is proof positive that the Koufax era was an experience that lifted all boats in the tide of competition.

I saw Sandy Koufax pitch once during his career. It was on August 8, 1964, in Milwaukee against the Braves. My memory of that game is Sandy Koufax diving back into second base on a pickoff attempt. When he reached third base, he was twirling his left arm around. Shortly thereafter he received the diagnosis of arthritis in his left elbow. Koufax was built with huge muscles in his back and arms and this very build made it possible for him to throw as well as he did, but it also meant he was due to break down earlier. Sports medicine was still in the future and pitchers pitched until they were worn out and then the owners got somebody else. Pitchers were disposable and since players weren't paid very much no attempt was made to protect them. Sandy had a contentious relationship with manager Walter Alston who, for whatever reason, wouldn't pitch Koufax early in his career even in years the Dodgers weren't involved in any pennant race. Pitchers weren't placed on pitch counts during the 1960's and there were seasons when Koufax logged over 300 innings and pitchers pitched every fourth day. Can you imagine pitching a complete game during spring training? Where was the common sense of managers during this time? Think about this for a minute. The total Dodger payroll for the fifteen years Buzzie Bavasi was general manager equals Kevin Brown's $15 million annual salary. When Koufax pitched his perfect game against the Cubs, Dodger Owner Walter O'Malley let the moths fly out of his wallet and gave Sandy a $500 raise. Prior to the start of the 7th game of the 1965 World Series against the Twins the Dodgers had a meeting in which Manager Walter Alston announced to the team who would start the game on the mound. Dick Tracewski remembers Alston saying, "We're going to start the left-hander. After that we have Drysdale and Perranoski in the bullpen." Tracewski noted that Sandy felt he should have called him by name instead of simply referring to him as "the left-hander." I agree. It appears that Alston wanted to maintain that distant relationship he had with Sandy. Many people consider Koufax somewhat of a recluse, but he shows up at Dodger fantasy camps, Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, and funerals of former teammates such as Joe Black and Pee Wee Reese. A prize possession of Cubs' pitcher Bob Hendley, who was Sandy's pitching opponent in the perfect game and who gave up only one hit himself and lost 1-0, is a baseball signed by Koufax with the simple inscription, "What a game." The book is really two stories alternating between the innings of the perfect game and Sandy's career. If you're a sports fan, this book should have a permanent place in your bookcase.

When I was a teenager, Sandy Koufax was my favorite athlete (and what a thrill I had when I met him in 1966 when I was 15). This book makes me realize just how great Koufax was. Leavy describes his elbow arthritis as an injury caused by the tendon being stretched out thus not giving the elbow support. Today, this would be cured with the "Tommy John" surgery. In other words, Koufax pitched at least two seasons while in need of this surgery!! These were two of the greatest seasons ever by any pitcher in history.

Koufax was famous for being a Jewish role model, particuualrly, for not pitching in the first game of the 1965 world series on Yom Kippur. Sandy was not religious, and despite alleged sightings in synagogues in Minneapolis, in fact, he did not even attend services. However, he realized how important Yom Kippur is and he showed the world that the holiest day on the Jewish calendar takes precedence over everything. What a great message to send!!

Koufax is a very reserved individual and he is not seen in public very much. He is not full of himself; quite the opposite, he is reserved, humble and somewhat shy. Even though he is not a public personality, according to Leavy, he is currently, very happy and he is always there for his friends. Unlike so many ex players who get old and paunchy, the silver haired Koufax weighs thirty pounds less than he did in his prime. He kept in shape by training for and running marathons. This book shows Koufax to be a man of great character, such as his strong friendship with Black teamates at a time when they were not allowed in the same restaurants and hotels as the white players were. He has always identified with the underdog and his best friends on the team were not the superstars but, rather, the utility players. I recommend this book for anyone who wishes to gain an appreciation of what an extraordinary man Sandy Koufax is.

I have to admit that part of the reason that I gave this book a 5 star rating is that it is about Koufax. ...
This book, however, leaves no doubt in the reader's mind that from 1961 to 1966, (a very very short period of time) Sandy Koufax was better than anyone has ever been. The book also sheds more light on just how painful it was for Koufax to pitch, and why it made sense for him to quit after the 1966 season when he won 27 games for a team that was one of the poorest hitting teams in the league.
The book was also very interesting on the subject of Walter Alston, the manager of the Dodgers for all of Koufax's career in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. The book suggests that Alston must share some of the blame for it taking as long as it did (1955 to 1961) before Koufax became a great pitcher. There were times when Alston would pitch Koufax, he would win the game with a 3 or 4 hitter, but then not pitch again for 30 days. That was insanity. Later, in the 60s, Alston used Koufax so much that perhaps it hastened the end of his pitching career.
Koufax essentially disappeared from the public after 1966. ... The book shed some light on this as well. Koufax is not shy or rude. He is reserved. In addition, one gets the impression that he decided after 1966 that he did not want to spend the rest of his life being Sandy Koufax, the greatest pitcher ever. He just wanted to go on with his life, and not spend every day talking about the past. Koufax told the author, "tell everyone I'm having great fun with my life." ... Koufax feels that the average reader does not know what most people do every day, and what the average "Joe" has done for the last 36 years, and therefore, why should the reader know what he does now. However, he just wants a next to normal life. ... His Brooklyn Jewish upbringing taught him to be modest, both about himself, and in his life. As one of the Koufax friends mentioned in the book, Koufax does not need a Mercedes. Give him a golf club, and a sandwich after the round of golf, and he is happy. This is the sign of a very good man. ... "
Maybe Sandy Koufax is not another Albert Einstein or Mother Teresa in terms of having an impact on society for the better, but the reader certainly has to conclude that he is a lot more than the greatest pitcher in baseball ever, and one of the top athletes of the 20th century. He is a fine person. An excellent role model. It is just too bad he chose not to have children.

Jane Leavy had a daunting task -- writing a biography of a living ex-ballplayer who would not let her interview him. Sandy Koufax is famous for many things including: (1) pitching ability -- including one of the best 4-5 year stretches in baseball history; (2) retirement at a young age [30] to prevent additional damage to his already debilitated arm, which led to induction in the Hall of Fame at 35 (the youngest inductee ever); (3) his refusal to pitch game 1 of the 1965 World Series because it took place on Yom Kippur; (4) winning game 7 of the '65 Series in a three-hit shutout on two days' rest with only his fastball; (5) his reputation as the sporting world's reclusive equivalent of Greta Garbo or J.D. Salinger.
Leavy approached this book the right way -- she did a great deal of research, interviewed his former teammates and contemporaries, interviewed the players who have met and learned from him since his retirement and researched his background. Moreover, this is not a straight biography because Koufax is so intensely private despite his larger place in baseball history -- a Jewish icon, a superstar who struggled for the first 6-7 years of his career, a minority white who helped bridge the racial divide in the first decade-plus after baseball's racial integration, a reluctant labor leader who held out for more money during the players-as-chattel era when players were bound to their teams and could not become free agents. Leavy is able to show Koufax's integrity, professionalism, work ethic and honesty through the numerous Koufax contemporaries she interviewed.
Leavy's work is highly readable and innovatively structured: the chapters detailing Koufax's life are separated by three-four page interlude chapters recalling, inning-by-inning, Koufax's perfect game against the Cubs in 1965 (his 4th no-hitter and the 4th-straight season in which he pitched a no-hitter). Leavy is a sportswriter and some of the stylistic quirks in her writing are annoying, but inconsequential (quote attribution can be confusing, sliding from direct quotes to non-quoted vernacular) traits that many sportswriters have. She also soft-pedals the anti-Semitism of Walter Alston, Koufax's manager, that both ESPN's and Sports Illustrated's Koufax retrospectives detailed.
All told, this is a fine book that places Koufax in perspective of his sports era, his religion, and the culture of the country as baseball expanded during the transition from the 1950s to the 1960s.

This is a very special book in many ways, not merely in telling the story of one of the most remarkable 20th century American athletes, but in the way author Jane Leavy tells his story. She deftly blends Sandy Koufax's own story with the story of the way our society and the game of baseball have changed since Sandy Koufax's career ended. Indeed, the world that Koufax knew when he first started playing professional baseball was already changing dramatically by the time he retired, and in many ways he helped it to change.

Many of the changes that Leavy notes were for the worst; many for the better. On the former, she documents the growth of the cult of celebrity, and the way public attention has made being famous an ordeal in addition to a supposed blessing. She recounts a simpler time, with less crass materiality, and perhaps more love of the game. On the other hand, she also shows how far we have come in attitudes towards race and the patriarchal attitude of baseball owners and managers. She hints at, but doesn't fully cover, the changes in the ways that pitchers are used since Koufax's day, changes that today extend the careers of many players. Bill James in his most recent historical abstract speculates that if Koufax were pitching today, he would have pitched every fifth day instead of every fourth, would have been held out of a start if his elbow was hurting too badly, and would have been held strictly to a pitch count each game. While he probably wouldn't have had individual seasons as great as he did, he would have probably pitched an additional eight or nine years, and instead of retiring with 165 wins, would probably have eclipsed 300. Leavy also connects many aspects of Koufax's career with some of the seminal events of the sixties.

I was raised Baptist, not Jewish, but my closest friend is Jewish, and although not at all a baseball fan, instantly said to me upon my telling her I was reading a great biography of Sandy Koufax, "Oh yeah, he is the guy who refused to pitch on Yom Kippur." Leavy expends a good deal of energy in detailing the enormous cultural impact that Koufax had by his insistence on not pitching in the World Series on Yom Kippur. She deals both with the contradictions (he was, after all, not a practicing Jew, and never had a bar mitzvah) and the motivations behind his refusal.

What emerges in the midst of all this is a heightened appreciation of Sandy Koufax as a baseball player, but even more admiration for him as a human being. I was impressed with his lack of desire to be a famous celebrity, his sense of social fairness and lack of racism, his integrity and personal courage, and what seems to be a genuinely good heart. You get a portrait of someone who is a fundamentally good human being, someone you admire apart from his excellence as a baseball pitcher. I especially enjoyed learning of things he has done since retiring, of his passion for life. One traditional view of the good life was that of fulfilling one's potential as a human being, and that certainly seems to fit the case of Koufax.

Years ago I more or less gave up on sports biography as a genre. Probably 99.5% of all sports biographies are puff pieces, pabulum for instant and easy consumption by fans who don't normally read books. That is absolutely not the case with this superb book. Perhaps there is a better sports biography, but if there is, I would very much like to know about it. I can honestly recommend this book not merely baseball fans, but anyone interested in American life in the latter half of the twentieth century. I hope this book becomes a model for other writers on sports figures.