Sandy Koufax; A Lefty's Legacy

New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2002. First Edition. Later printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 24 cm. xxii, 282 pages. Illustrated endpapers. Illustrations. Appendix. Index. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Signed by the author on the title page. Jane Leavy (born December 26, 1951) is an American sportswriter and feature writer, formerly with the Washington Post. She writes particularly about baseball. She is the author of the 1990 comic novel Squeeze Play, which was called "the best novel ever written about baseball" by Entertainment Weekly. She also wrote a best-selling 2002 biography of Sandy Koufax. In 2010 she published The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, an extensive chronicle of Mantle's off-field behavior. The book was based on interviews she had with the late Yankee slugger. Her new book, The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, was named one of the top ten biographies/memoirs for the fall of 2018 by Publishers Weekly. Leavy graduated from Barnard College in 1974 and from Columbia University School of Journalism in 1976. Sanford Koufax (born Sanford Braun; December 30, 1935) is an American former professional baseball left-handed pitcher. He pitched 12 seasons for the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers of Major League Baseball (MLB) from 1955 to 1966. Koufax, at age 36 in 1972, became the youngest player ever elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He has been hailed as one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history. Koufax's career peaked with a run of six outstanding years from 1961 to 1966, before arthritis in his left elbow ended his career prematurely at age 30. He was an All-Star for six seasons and was the National League's Most Valuable Player in 1963. He won three Cy Young Awards in 1963, 1965, and 1966, by unanimous votes, making him the first three-time Cy Young winner in baseball history and the only one to win three times when one overall award was given for all of Major League Baseball instead of one award for each league. Koufax also won the NL Triple Crown for pitchers those same three years by leading the NL in wins, strikeouts, and earned run average.

Koufax was the first major league pitcher to pitch four no-hitters and the eighth pitcher to pitch a perfect game in baseball history. Despite his comparatively short career, Koufax's 2,396 career strikeouts ranked 7th in history as of his retirement, at the time trailing only Warren Spahn (2,583) among left-handers. Koufax, Trevor Hoffman, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martínez, and Nolan Ryan are the only five pitchers elected to the Hall of Fame who had more strikeouts than innings pitched.

Koufax is also remembered as one of the outstanding Jewish athletes in American sports. His decision not to pitch Game 1 of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur garnered national attention as an example of conflict between professional pressures and personal beliefs.

Derived for a Kirkus review: Leavy has produced a very convincing portrait. She concentrates on the player's last six playing years, when his fastball and curve ruled. His plays on the mound are adeptly recorded—including his perfect game, told with consummate skill. But it's a sense of Koufax's character that Leavy most wishes to convey. Koufax has been shoehorned into the recluse category; because he is reserved and Jewish, he was typecast as "moody, aloof, curt, intellectual, different." Yes, he wouldn't pitch the opening game of the World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, an act with profound cultural impact. But Leavy reveals also a man of dignity, honesty, and courtesy, not to mention his having that shaman's touch with a baseball. He is, simply, a standard: "In virtually every way that matters, ethically and economically, medically and journalistically, he offers a way to measure where we've been, what we've come to, what we've lost." Well-conceived and sharply drawn, a thinking fan's biography.