Title/Author:
“Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy” by Jane Leavy
Tags:
Baseball, Dodgers, biography
Publish date:
September 17, 2002
Length:
282 pages
Rating:
5 of 5 stars (outstanding)
Review:
Anyone who watched
baseball in the five year period between 1962 and 1966 will tell you that the
best pitcher during that stretch was Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
There are so many stories about how good he was, and many of them are shared in
this excellent biography of the pitcher written by Jane Leavy.
The format of the book
is not the typical format for a sports biography. The chapters alternate between
Koufax stories and the innings of the most spectacular game of his career – a perfect
game thrown against the Chicago Cubs on September 9, 1965. That game was also marked by the fact that
the Cubs pitcher, Bob Hendley, threw a great game as well, allowing only one
hit, but ended up as the losing pitcher. No matter whether the chapter is about that game,
Koufax’s teenage years in Brooklyn, his struggles early in his career, his
meteoric rise to greatness or his post-baseball life, the reader is sure to not
only be engrossed in the material, but will also learn something new about the
pitcher.
All of the legendary
stories about Koufax are covered – his decision to not pitch on Yom Kippur when
it fell on the same day as game 1 of the 1965 World Series is described in
great detail and what it meant to Jewish people across the country is just one
of them. Later in that series, he shut
out the Minnesota Twins in game 7 with just two days’ rest.
Leavy covers the
famous holdout against the Dodgers that he and fellow Los Angeles pitcher Don
Drysdale executed in 1966. She makes a
case that this action was just as important to the eventual abolishment of
baseball’s reserve clause as was Curt Flood’s legal case that was heard by the
Supreme Court. She states that had
Koufax and Drysdale had not held out, then Flood’s case could not have
happened. While I agree with her
argument, it is hard to see how they are connected.
Leavy writes about
Koufax’s early troubles with the Dodgers as part of a bigger issue that all
teams had with “bonus baby” players, which Koufax was. If a player was offered a bonus to sign his
first contract about a certain threshold, he had to remain on the major league
roster for at least two years. This rule
was in effect until the amateur draft began in 1965, and many clubs let these
players languish on the bench or only gave them sporadic game action. The latter was the case for Koufax, as he
didn’t get a lot of innings until the decade changed to the 1960’s. Ironically, once it was seen how dominant a
pitcher Koufax became, the same manager (Walter Alston) who used him so little
early in his career now seemed to overuse Koufax.
The last topic this
review will mention that the author wrote about in depth was the extent of his
arm pain, which led to his retirement after the 1966 World Series when he was
at the peak of his performance. The description
of his arm during off days, rubdowns on game day and the lotion used to relieve
his pain runs the gamut from funny (the reaction of a kid who put on a
game-used jersey by Koufax that still had the ointment on the sleeve was
hilarious) to the grotesque (just about any description of the swelling of the
arm after a game).
There is much more to
this book but these are just a few snippets of the wonderful stories that Leavy
weaves together to make this a book that every baseball fan, especially fans of
the game in the 1960’s, will want to pick up.
Book Format Read:
Hardcover
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