NYT-Bestseller Jane Leavy on Baseball Great Sandy Koufax

The Learning Curve Jane Leavy

Albert Cheng: Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Learning Curve Podcast. I’m one of your co-hosts this week, Albert Cheng, and joining me is Charlie Chieppo. Charlie, welcome back to the show.

Charlie Chieppo: Well, thank you, Albert. It’s good to be here. Good to be working with you again. It’s been a while.

Albert Cheng: That’s right.

And I guess the listeners might surmise that maybe we have an episode on baseball, ’cause you’re here.

Charlie Chieppo: Yeah, well, I, you know, I’m like Rain Man. There’s, like, one or two things I’m good at. Baseball is

Albert Cheng: my- Well, if you’re listening and that’s what you are guessing, that is true. We’re gonna have Jane Levy back with us in a little bit here to talk about Sandy Koufax.

Hey, I’m looking forward to this. Even though I’m a Giants fan, I am looking forward to learning and hearing more about Sandy Koufax.

Charlie Chieppo: If you were a little bit older, Albert, he would’ve caused you a great deal of pain, believe me.

Albert Cheng: Well, look, there’s not much to cheer about- Yeah … the Giants these days, [00:01:00] and I guess all the attention’s on the Dodgers, so oh, well.

Yeah. Such is life. But hey, before we get to the interview with Jane, why don’t we talk about some education news? Charlie, not only did you find something, you wrote something, didn’t you?

Charlie Chieppo: Well, yes, I am a blatant self-promoter here. I, I… This is from a column that I co-wrote with Steven Wilson, who’s also been a guest on The Learning Curve, that ran about 10 days ago in The Boston Globe, and it’s about charter schools.

And when Stanford researchers examined student outcomes for 2015 to 2019 in 29 states and Washington, DC, and New York City, they identified some 200 urban charter school networks that were closing or even reversing longstanding achievement gaps in reading, math, or both. More importantly, these schools were proving to be scalable.

They were adding about 50,000 students annually, equivalent to opening a new district [00:02:00] and larger than the Boston public schools each year. And Boston’s charters were among the best of them. A 2016 Brookings Institution report found that test score gains produced by Boston charters are some of the largest that have ever been documented for an at scale education intervention.

That wasn’t an accident. For two decades, teachers at Boston’s really high-performing charters had pledged never to make excuses for low achievement. They would do whatever it took for their students to succeed: safe and orderly classrooms, high expectations, engaging curricula, precisely crafted lessons, more time to learn, you know, every s- child from all kinds of different backgrounds on the path to college and career.

But the wind started to shift around 2019, and the change accelerated after the murder of George Floyd by a, a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. A lot of new- newly minted teachers said charter schools, longer days, disciplinary systems, [00:03:00] standardized testing were racist. Academic expectations were lessened.

Curricula, even in math, were rewritten to foreground social inequities. To me, the most troubling thing was the view that before delivering a rigorous curriculum, teachers needed to address students’ trauma from growing up in a racist society. It was an inexhaustible excuse for failure. You know, during the pandemic, as a result, the percentage of Boston charter students meeting or exceeding expectations on the state’s 10th-grade math test fell by more than twice as much as their counterparts in the Boston Public Schools.

Look, racism is real. Learning about it must be part of every child’s education. But replacing a rich academic education with anti-racist programming rather than including that programming as part of the curriculum turned the very students who so-called r- anti-racist education was supposed to help into its biggest [00:04:00] victims.

And that’s basically what we wrote about. Obviously, something I feel very strongly about, so just wanted to share that with our listeners

Albert Cheng: Thanks for sharing that and for writing that piece, Charlie. And, and I know we’ve discussed this topic quite a bit on numerous episodes on the show. As you mentioned, we’ve had Steve Wilson on quite some times, and I’m trying to think about all the other shows we’ve done with some folks who research this stuff, and they’ve been on to provide some of the data for what you’re talking about as well.

So anyway, thanks for bringing it up, and I- Yeah … hopefully we keep this conversation going because we need to keep up the quality of educational opportunities. What have you got? Well, Charlie, you know, I thought we’d take a gander to my home state of California since we’re … Look, we’re talking about Sandy Koufax, and look, I know they’re Brooklyn Dodgers, but they’re, they’re always LA to me.

Anyway, th- this is kind of a fun time of the year, I, I, ’cause this is the, uh, time of the year where we kind of discover the litany of new laws that the California State Legislature- … has passed in the [00:05:00] past legislative cycle. So there’s an article with, that lists some of them, and some of them are interesting and some are surprising.

There’s one about how loud advertisements on streaming platforms can be. But that’s not why I’m bringing up this article. I’m bringing up this article because there’s a couple new laws for California schools, and the one that caught my eye is that now all school districts are gonna be required to have some sort of cell phone policy.

And what strikes me about the California law is that they’re taking a different course than some of the other states like in Arkansas. You know, Arkansas has a ban on cell phone use in schools. The California law is actually leaving it up to school districts to figure out the policy that’s gonna work for them.

And I just wanna highlight that ’cause I think it’s an interesting take on this. It’s a complicated issue to resolve, you know, tech use, screen time, cell phone use. And I wonder if California, they’re kind of ripping a [00:06:00] page out of the federalist system, I guess, that we have. You know, we just celebrated the 4th and the wisdom of a federal system of government, and here we’re, we’re kind of seeing that California do that.

The state is requiring districts to figure out a policy and maybe the, um, instead of the 50 labs of democracy, I don’t know how many school districts are in California, maybe there’s gonna be a bunch of labs at the school district level to figure out, “Hey, how do we get cell phone policy and technology policy right in school?”

So this is just being rolled out, and folks ought to maybe stay tuned to see how this all works out.

Charlie Chieppo: Those California legislators are just free market extremists, Albert. That’s what it is.

Albert Cheng: Yeah. Well, look, they’re appealing to some principles of sub- sub-subsidiarity and federalism here, so-

Charlie Chieppo: Yeah …

Albert Cheng: kudos to them.

I, I, I think there’s some wisdom in taking this approach- Right … to this complicated issue. All right. Well, hey, enough about ed policy. Let’s talk baseball and Sandy Koufax, so stick [00:07:00] around.

Jane Leavy is the award-winning author of The New York Times bestsellers The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, the comic novel Squeeze Play, and a contributor to Driven to Write: 45 Writers on the Motives and Mysteries of Their Craft.

Her most recent book is Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It. She was a staff writer at the Washington Post from 1979 to 1988, first in the sports section, where she covered baseball, tennis, and the Olympics for the paper, and then writing features for the style section about sports, politics, and popular culture.

On Friday, September 21st, 2018, Leavy threw out the first pitch for the Yankees-Orioles game at Yankee Stadium. She graduated from Barnard College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Jane, welcome back to The [00:08:00] Learning Curve.

Jane Leavy: Oh, I am so glad to be here, guys. I mean, it’s July 4th, and as far as I can tell, the best way to celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States is to talk about Sandy Koufax.

Albert Cheng: Yeah, and baseball.

Jane Leavy: Exactly.

Albert Cheng: That’s right. So let’s start from the beginning here. Why don’t you provide listeners with a brief overview of Sandy Koufax? Why is he such a widely celebrated player and person?

Jane Leavy: When I autograph books, I don’t just sign my name. I think that’s somehow, like, cheaping out on readers and people who actually spend the money.

So I always try to write something personal if they ask for it, or I come up with something that I think speaks to the essence of the book. And so for Koufax, what I always write is, “He’s as good a person as he was a pitcher.” And that, to me, is the essence of Sandy Koufax. Was he the best who [00:09:00] ever threw a baseball?

Maybe. He didn’t throw it as long, as many innings, as many years, as many wins or losses as other people or other left-handers, notably Warren Spahn, but the ball came out of his hand different, as baseball players like to say. It just did things that other people’s fastballs and curveballs didn’t do. To today, players who hit against him, and there are fewer and fewer of them around, you know, say, “It just came out of his hand different.”

Albert Cheng: Well, let’s talk about his upbringing and shed some light on that because I think that had some role into shaping him both as a pitcher and a person. As you know in your biography of Sandy Koufax, he was born to a Jewish family in 1935 in Brooklyn, New York. His parents divorced when he was a kid and spent much of his childhood with his maternal grandparents, and then often attended Jewish summer camps during the [00:10:00] summer.

How did that all play a role in shaping him? Were there educational influences, other religious influences? What about his early athletic experiences?

Jane Leavy: Well, he thought he was gonna be a New York Knick to start with. He was not a kid who was known in Bensonhurst in Brooklyn as a ballplayer. He only started playing baseball in Brooklyn because all his pals were doing it.

He was known as a basketball player. He could dunk. He has huge hands, which yes, had a lot to do with how he could control a baseball, but also how he could control a basketball. And he was raised in Bensonhurst, which was, you know, a place where lots of athletes came out of actually at that time, by his mother.

His father, Jack Braung left the family when he was three, and the biggest male influence in his life was his grandfather, [00:11:00] Max, who was an electrician and a lefty and a man of Jewish culture, albeit not particularly observant. And so Sandy grew up with a, a strong Jewish cultural background, but not necessarily a devout one, as people would say.

So his grandfather, you know, was somebody who worked at the Con Ed plant on the East River. You know, he was the, the day he was to show up for work, the big gates opened there and, and they closed behind him, and Max said, “Not for me. That’s not why I came to this country,” and he didn’t go back. He took Sandy to Jewish theater and Yiddish theater, and he contributed to what Fred Wilpon, Fred Wilpon, who was the former owner of the, of the Mets and who was the pitcher that everybody talked about in Bensonhurst, at making Sandy a very Jewish being.

Mm-hmm. And that [00:12:00] is the best description of him in terms of religion. Were there other religious influences? No. There was no other Jewish… There was no other religion there in Bensonhurst. He applied to college and he walked on at Cincinnati as a baseball player. He did not have a scholarship, though people insist upon saying he did.

He was a walk-on, and he went there to play basketball basically. Yeah. And what happened was, you know, this is typical Koufax, that he found out that the baseball team was going to New Orleans for spring break, and it’s his freshman year, and he thought, “Well, that sounds a lot better than going back to Bensonhurst,” and so he joined the baseball team.

He had absolutely no tutoring, no lettering, no practice. He was completely a natural. Mm-hmm. And because of that, and because of the lack of coaching, he just did what his body and his [00:13:00] physiognomy allowed him to do. Mm-hmm. And that meant either the pitches were perfect or he didn’t know where the hell they were going And baseball scouts and the, the Dodgers saw how he could throw and with vehemence and velocity, but he couldn’t control it.

So that’s why he pitched so little in the first six years of his life. He couldn’t get the ball over the plate. Today, nobody would care. Everybody would say, “Oh, fine.” You know? No problem. So he was a bonus baby, which in 1955, the year he signed, meant that they had to keep him on the Major League roster, and that meant also that Tommy Lasorda, another lefty in the Dodgers camp, spring training camp in 1955, was sent to the minor leagues in Montreal, actually, and he never forgave Koufax

Albert Cheng: Well, before we get to his major league career, let’s talk a bit about his collegiate career, which you’ve mentioned.

Speaking of throwing pitches of where you, where you [00:14:00] don’t know where the ball’s going, you actually write in your biography, quote, “He had 51 strikeouts in 32 innings and 30 walks.” So talk about the extremes. Could you say more about his collegiate baseball career, and then say more about just his pitching style, physique, his mechanics, and how that might have all played into the fact that he never played in the minor leagues, but just kind of went straight and signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers?

Jane Leavy: His collegiate career was sort of an accident, and it was minimal. The stats you cite are completely revealing of the unlettered pitcher that he was at that time. He just picked up a ball and started throwing. So it was enough to make mouths water in Brooklyn at the front offices of the Dodgers in Montague Street and elsewhere.

And in fact, the Yankees sent a Jewish scout to visit him, which so pissed him off and the [00:15:00] rest of his family that he said, “No way am I ever going to be a Yankee.” So his college career is minimal. He didn’t play in the minors, not because he didn’t need to be there, he certainly could’ve used some seasoning, but because there was a rule in Major League Baseball at that time that if you were a bonus baby, which means you were given a hunk of dough in addition to your minimal salary, that you had to stay on the Major League roster.

And so he was on that 1955 Dodgers World Championship team. He never pitched a ball, never threw anything. In fact, he was enrolled in architecture school at Columbia at the same time, and that was the thing he thought he would do if baseball didn’t work out, and there was not a lot of reason to think that baseball was gonna work out.

So he went to his architecture professor and asked if he could miss class in order to go to the World Series. And the professor said, [00:16:00] “Why?” And he said, “Well, I’m on the team.” N- not that anybody could have told him. And, you know, the story of his early career with the Dodgers is that he wasn’t trusted by Walter Alston, the manager, which is understandable, and he wasn’t used, and the few times he was, you could see flashes of the pitcher that he would become But the transformation didn’t really take place until 1960, and it’s a wonderful story.

They, during spring training, he was sent to a, what they call a B game on the Dodger plane, and Gil Hodges was managing the game, and they only sent three pitchers, and he was the starter. One of the pitchers, you know, didn’t show up because he was hung over, Ed Roebuck, as a matter of fact, was his name, and he walked the bases full in the first inning.

And his catcher, Norm Sherry, another nice Jewish boy playing for the Dodgers, walked out to the mound and said, “For Christ’s [00:17:00] sakes, Sandy, you know, you gotta, you know, just throw it over the plate.” That, of course, was the hardest thing for Sandy Koufax to do, and he did have some tutoring during that spring training.

Not formal, to say the least. When a Dodger coach and scout named Kenny Myers took him aside in this cheap bar that they all went to and drew a home plate with a cigar ash on a wooden wall and showed him that his release point was so much too high that that’s why the ball was going every which way, and showed him how and where and how much lower he had to release the ball.

So when Norm Sherry says to him then, I don’t know if it was the next day or a couple of days later, “You gotta throw the ball over the plate,” Sandy said, “You want me to throw the ball over the plate? Then I’ll throw the ball over the plate.” And from that moment, he stopped trying to throw it through the [00:18:00] catcher’s glove or over the catcher’s glove.

He took a little off, is what he did, as they put it in baseballeeze, and nobody scored. He got the, everyone out in that first inning. Nobody reached home plate, and he was transformed

Albert Cheng: Well, we’re gonna get to really the pinnacle of his career in, in the 1960s when all that really picked up. But before we get there, just to set the stage a little bit to baseball landscape in the 1950s, you write in your biography, quote, “Ownership, however, regarded the signing of a Jewish ballplayer the way others regarded the coming of the Messiah.

The Dodgers were so desperate for a Jewish presence given the demographics of Brooklyn.” So could you talk about some of the earlier Jewish players in the major leagues, like Hank Greenberg, Al Rosen? What did this all mean? What, what did their legacies mean for Sandy, and in terms of having a Jewish ballplayer in 1950s America?

Jane Leavy: You know, Hank [00:19:00] Greenberg, the great Detroit slugger, certainly went through everything Sandy went through in terms of bias and skepticism, you know, the perception that Jews are scholars, not athletes, that stereotype of the nebbishy Jewish guy, and these guys were both, you know… They were hunks, right? And you know, Hank went through the whole thing of do you play on the high holidays?

Do you not play on the high holidays in the fall, which are Yom Kippur, you know, the most important day and holiest day on the Jewish calendar, and on Rosh Hashanah, which comes just before, which is the new year. And he got a dispensation from a, from a rabbi to play on Rosh Hashanah. And you know, he was in the run-up to, you know, the Nazi plague of Europe and the world.

He was a beacon, and he was incredibly, incredibly good. But he was in Detroit, and that makes a big [00:20:00] difference And then, you know, Al Rosen was a wonderful third baseman for the Cleveland then Indians, and he went on to a long career in front office, including being a Yankee general manager. And, and on that team, the Willie Mays team that won the ’54 World Series.

But there were no Blacks in baseball, in Major League Baseball when Hank played. By the time Sandy comes around, Jackie Robinson was his teammate, and there were several other notable Black players on the Dodgers who were there. And there was a time that there was a, an allegiance and a sense of shared experience back in the day between Blacks and Jews.

And tho- the Black players on the Dodgers, Joe Black, Don Newcombe, Jackie, they took him under their wing. They understood the bias that he was confronting, some of which was very subtle and some overt. And so when Sandy comes around, it’s now [00:21:00] there are Black players in baseball, and it’s after the Holocaust, and that meant that the experience of being an American Jew was significantly different.

My parents, for example, were, I think like his, very Jewish beings, but very assimilated. I remember it being a big deal when they bought a, a Mercedes. Oy, you know, a German car. So he’s a figure of a different type than Hank was. He signifies that you can root for someone who’s Jewish, but not because he’s Jewish.

So a lot of people did root for him just because he was Jewish, but he was Superman, and in, in that generation of fans who came to adulthood after the camps cl- I mean, so remember, ’65, the year he pitched his perfect game, is just 20 years after the closing of the camps in Germany. The acceptance and the assimilation of Jews into American culture was [00:22:00] really different.

It was, had really changed. I mean, I hated him Not because he was a Dodger, though I did hate the Dodgers. I was a Yankee fan. But the significance of it was, for me as a little Jewish kid, I didn’t have to root for Sandy Koufax. I could be a Mickey Mantle fan. The big goy from Oklahoma was my hero, because to be a Jew in 1965 meant you didn’t have to root for the Jew just ’cause he was the Jew.

And who knew I was rooting for the wrong guy? I found that out, I found that out somewhat sometime later.

Albert Cheng: Thanks. A bit of humor there. You know, I appreciate this background, and actually, you, you kind of discuss more of this in your book. Reading a passage here, quote, “The year 1955 would prove seminal for both the Dodgers and the country.

Graham Greene published The Quiet American, which is about Vietnam. A Black woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The development of the oral polio vaccine was announced.” I mean, [00:23:00] so you talked a, a little bit about, you know, the experience of being Jewish and Black.

How about some of those other things going on in the background? What did that mean for baseball? I’d like to hear maybe how that all kind of set the stage for Sandy Koufax’s Major League debut on June 24th, 1955, in Ebbets Field.

Jane Leavy: I think what I was trying to do in the book by tying his career to those kinds of events is if you look at the 12 years that he was in the Major Leagues and retiring after 1966, it was a period of extraordinary change, both in America and specifically in baseball.

Again, in 1955, I think the bonus baby salary or the average salary in Major League Baseball was $6,500. And today we’re waiting for there to be a walkout or a lockout at the end of the 2026 season because ballplayers are resisting a cap on salaries because [00:24:00] people like Juan Soto are signing for $765 million.

It’s unseemly to me, but athletes and specifically baseball players had no rights whatsoever. There were no protections for them. The healthcare was minimal. There was carelessness about the fields that they played on. Go look at the pictures of Mickey Mantle catching a spike in the cyclone fence in Baltimore in ’63.

Nobody thought about that. You know, nobody thought about what’s it like to play on these fields. So by the end of Sandy’s career, his last year, ’66, he and Don Drysdale are holding out in spring training and saying they’re not gonna sign until both of them are satisfied with the salary offers. And that was a far more significant event.

You know, and Marvin Miller, who had just come on as the leader of the Major League Baseball Players Association, would talk about that. It [00:25:00] was a union, but a union of two. It showed the players something about what would happen if they were aligned, if they were unified. And Don was the one who cracked. He had to go back, as Sandy said, he had a wife and kids.

Sandy did not. And so they gave up and gave in. They both got more than $100,000. I think Sandy got 125 and Don got 115. But it was legally and conceptually a major step and a significant one in the formation of player rights and in to where we are today. I don’t think I remember Sandy’s debut, and the reason is I would’ve been four, and my father, the reason I hate the Dodgers and the reason that I can’t remember it, is in 1957, just before Walter O’Malley broke Brooklyn’s heart by taking the Dodgers out of [00:26:00] Brooklyn and moving them to Los Angeles and announcing he was gonna do that, my father took my sister to a game that Sandy pitched.

Yeah, I was deemed too young to go And so I turned my hatred on Koufax and on the Dodgers. Therefore, when I was asked to write a book about Sandy Koufax, I just looked at the editor who proposed the idea and said, “Are you crazy? I hate him. I hate him, and I hate him for what he did to Mickey Mantle in the ’63 World Series too.”

So you’ll have to tell me about that first game, ’cause I don’t remember it.

Charlie Chieppo: Well, Sandy’s breakout season was 1961. He went 18 and 13, led the majors with 269 strikeouts, breaking the National League’s 58-year-old single-season record for strikeouts. But talk to us a little bit more about those sort of wilderness years, 1955 to 1960, with the many ups and downs, and you talked a little bit about it before with the Norm Sherry story, but what were the circumstances that led him to becoming the [00:27:00] dominant pitcher that we think of him as?

Jane Leavy: He wasn’t used in those years. There are highlight moments, like the 1959 World Series, but Walter Alston didn’t trust him, and he had reason, frankly. You know, you need a guy who can get the ball over the plate. Today, that’s not so important apparently, but anyway, he toiled in a, in obscurity. He didn’t get a lot of opportunities.

It certainly angered him. He couldn’t understand, especially as he started to come around. You could see flashes of how good he was, how dominant he would become- Mm-hmm … like that 1959 World Series game against the Chicago White Sox, but he still wasn’t given a chance until they were until they were desperate.

Sandy’s pitching, first of all, he had an incredible physiognomy in a time when pitchers, people were still pretty small. Mm. Sandy Koufax was 6’2″, 220 pounds, and chiseled. And [00:28:00] there was a time when Walter Alston came by and grabbed the area around, you know, where, where you have love handles, right? Getting ready to tell him he needed to lose some weight and it was muscle.

He had no idea. The manager had no clue. So he was an incredible physical specimen at a time when people were still facing, you know, little nebbishes like Spud Webb. Yes. It… Uh, and he had an incredible control of the ball. The first time I started to, you know, look into people I should talk to, I went to see Dave Wallace, who was a very good friend of his and who worked with him in the Dodgers minor league system after Sandy retired.

And Dave is a lauded baseball coach who worked for the Mets, and the Dodgers, and the Red Sox, and the Atlanta Braves, and, you know, people swear by him still. And he said to me, “Have you…” And I don’t remember whether he said, “Have you shooken?” Or, “Have you shaken, have you [00:29:00] shaken his hand?” And I still don’t know which is the right way to say it, if there is a right way to say it.

And I said, “No.” And he said, “You shake his hand and you can answer the question, what made Sandy Koufax Sandy Koufax?” His hands are so big- Mm … that before age and arthritis set in, he could hold five Major League baseballs in his hand.

Charlie Chieppo: Oh, my gosh.

Jane Leavy: And what that means is that when he was only tasked with having to throw one- He had complete control over it.

Charlie Chieppo: Yeah.

Jane Leavy: He showed my daughter how to throw his curve ball in the rabbi’s study before her bat mitzvah. You know? And, and he said, “Oh, you know,” he’s… I, ’cause I had said to him, “Oh, Emma has really big hands. She can throw your curve ball.” “Thanks, Mom.” And he said, “Oh, Emma, let me see your curve ball.” And Emma looks at me like, “Oh, please.

I can’t believe- … you did this to me.” So Sandy takes a ball, ’cause I had thoughtfully brought a bag of them, and [00:30:00] holds it between his middle finger and his ring finger, you know, his left hand. His middle finger, I have small hands, but his middle finger is, I don’t know, six inches, seven inches long, something like that.

And the way he threw his curve ball was just to rest that ball, the seams of the ball against his middle finger and chop down. It was like a, it was like an Atlanta- Yeah … Braves chop. You know, everybody threw balls, threw curve balls by twisting their wrist, right? They thought that was the key. Absolutely.

He said to Emma right then, “That’s how Branch Rickey wrecked 100 pitchers, by making them twist their wrist like that. That causes injuries.” Yeah. “Don’t do that. It’s a chop. It’s a chop.” And he, I have video of, you know, the rabbi, the rabbi’s wife, the cantor, my daughter, the other bar mitzvah, in the, the rabbi’s study following his motion.

But he was able to do that because his [00:31:00] hands were so big. He just generated all the spin of the curve ball off that one finger.

Charlie Chieppo: When you say that, it, it really comes together for me because when I look at films of him, he had such a 12 to 6 curve ball, you know, and moved side to side a little bit, but it just fell off a table.

And that-

Jane Leavy: Yeah …

Charlie Chieppo: probably explains why

Jane Leavy: Well, y- yes, he had a, a, a, a now abandoned 12-6 delivery out of which he threw both his incomparable fastball and the curveball that folded like a cheap chair at a bar mitzvah, right? Yeah. At a bar mitzvah table. And the hitters said that you literally couldn’t tell whether it was going up or down.

A nulling, that’s the new lingo, which means that, you know, can you throw different pitches on the same plane so that, again, you don’t know what’s coming. Sandy was doing that without the benefit of analytics and machinery and technology, and what that was was [00:32:00] not only incredibly effective, but beautiful.

Right. That’s the thing about Koufax that you have to remember. He was not only incredibly effective and powerful, I mean, nobody knows exactly how many rotations his curveball spun or how many miles an hour his fastball traveled, but his delivery and the proportions of his body were perfect. He looks like a, a Greek statue up there- Mm-hmm

in motion. And I mean, the effort, you know, you could- I mean, sure you can see how much effort he put into it. You know, and he never said no to taking the ball. This is when pitchers pitched every four days, not every five or six as they are want to do today, and when they thought a complete game was what you were supposed to aspire to.

Yeah. I mean, Sandy Koufax, in his last year, when he had traumatic arthritis in his elbow [00:33:00] and was getting shots of… He was taking butazolidine, a drug that’s now off the market ’cause it rots your stomach. It was used on horses, too, and it killed a few of them. He was taking codeine before he pitched, and he had steroid shots in his arm, not steroids, but cortisone shots.

He threw 27 complete games in 1966. Wow. Do you know how many was the most any pitcher, Major League pitcher threw last year?

Charlie Chieppo: It’s a lot less than 27.

Jane Leavy: The answer is two.

Charlie Chieppo: Yeah, there you go. Yeah.

Jane Leavy: And-

Charlie Chieppo: It’s an

Jane Leavy: amazing difference … and Sandy said, “You know, we didn’t know any better.” Right. We didn’t know any better.

The game as it is designed today, when played today, has diminished the role of the starting pitcher, the, you know, the hero who’s 10 paces away and is gonna chart a duel with you with, with his, you know, with his arm, and you’re gonna duel with him with your bat. That’s [00:34:00] gone. That mythology and I think the intoxicating narrative of baseball has been destroyed by the way pitching has developed.

And so you don’t have those… You know, why couldn’t Sandy get Hank Aaron out? Match-ups back in those days were the reasons to go to a game. You wanted to see Sandy pitch against Bob Gibson. Which one of them… You know, you wanted to see Sandy pitch against Juan Marichal, or Sandy try to get Hank or Willie out.

There were batters he just couldn’t get out, you know? And the stories baseball used to tell it can’t tell anymore because of the way pitching is deployed and because of the way the deployment of pitching has destroyed so many pitching arms

Charlie Chieppo: Oh, yes. God, that is certainly true.

Jane Leavy: And of course, Sandy was pitching his last two years with traumatic arthritis in his elbow.

That is, I made a mistake in this [00:35:00] book and he has since corrected me, and I’m grateful for it. I wrote as a way of a benchmark of change in the game that h- had he been born 10 years later, he, not Tommy John, would have been the first candidate for Tommy John surgery, where you transplant a ligament to reinforce that which is destroyed by the stress of throwing.

In fact, he wouldn’t have been because he didn’t have a torn UCL. Right. He had traumatic arthritis, and what that meant was that, you know, he would get up in the morning after he pitched and his arm would be black. He would have protrusions of hard-boiled egg size under his skin of swelling. It was a different kind of injury, but certainly as disabling, and there was nothing other than pain medication and anti-inflammatories, which were in their, you know, it, that was new idea back then, anti-inflammatories.

Icing your arm was still a pretty [00:36:00] radical new thing to do back then. So, you know, he just said to the Dodger doctor, Bob Kerlan, who also had arthritis, “You tell me when I’m in danger of not being able to brush my own teeth and button my own shirt and comb my own hair.” Yeah. And finally, Kerlan did. Kerlan told him in early ’66, “This is it.”

Yeah. “You’re done.” Sandy had already decided that pretty much. He told people in ’65, as early as ’65, that he knew he was on fumes because the pain was enormous But as he says about not stopping, not giving up, not signaling for the bullpen, you know, we didn’t know any better.

Charlie Chieppo: Right. To me, what makes that even more amazing was he wakes up with this black arm, you know, with like a egg underneath, you know, under the skin, and he’s not going a week later.

You know, he’s got three days off and he’s doing it again. Yeah. Yeah. [00:37:00] It’s, it’s truly unbelievable. It’s unbelievable.

Jane Leavy: He was the kinda guy, I mean, I’m sure you that not remember this, know it from reading it in the book, that, you know, for the Dodgers to win the pennant on the last day of ’66, they were vying against the Giants and they were all watching, you know, scoreboard watching.

Sandy volunteered to go down to the bullpen in the first game when the Dodgers were losing. He ended up not pitching then, but he did pitch the second game which they had to win, and his back was so tight that he was hang- You, you could see him hanging from the top of the dugout trying to stretch it out.

Wow. And between games, and the, the umpire, Doug Harvey, told me this story, they took him in the locker room and pulled on him literally. You had two guys at the top and two guys at the bottom to try to stretch out his back. So he was physiologically done by the end of ’66, and he knew it, and after the Dodgers [00:38:00] lost that World Series to the Baltimore Orioles four games straight in which young Jim Palmer-

Charlie Chieppo: Yeah

Jane Leavy: beat Kovaks in a final game.

Charlie Chieppo: First World Series, I remember. Yeah.

Jane Leavy: He told one of the Dodger beat writers, a guy named Phil Collier, who was actually wrote for San Diego paper, “This is it. I’m gonna tell everybody on the plane I’m done it.” And Phil, again, you wanna talk about how different today is from then, Phil said, “Oh, for Christ sakes, Sandy, don’t do that.

You’ll screw up every AM beat guy in America”, you know? And it, it hadn’t occurred to him. You know, I mean, there was… If he got off the plane and announced it, it wouldn’t be in any AM papers, right? It would, make, may- maybe make some afternoon papers. So he held off and he didn’t announce his retirement until November, and people were puzzled.

Right. And when he was asked why he was doing it, he said, “Well, I’d like to be able to comb my own hair and tie my own shoes.” Probably the most amazing thing about him to [00:39:00] me, and the reason I say to people he’s an even better person than he was a pitcher, after the last out of his perfect game in 1965 at Dodger Stadium, um, Chavez Ravine, which was a mesmerizing event and, you know, September 9, ’65, the smoke from the Watts fires were still hovering over- Ugh

the sky beyond the outfield. What’s the first thing he does after the, the last pitch? He goes to home plate to shake the hand of the home plate umpire Eddie Vargo, who had called one of his previous no-hitters. So this was his fourth, right? The fourth one being perfect and he says to Eddie Vargo, “You had a perfect game too.”

Charlie Chieppo: Wow. That’s amazing.

Jane Leavy: Yeah.

Charlie Chieppo: That’s a great story

Jane Leavy: And Koufax had the imagination to see himself as something other than just a ballplayer. Maybe that’s because he never really expected to [00:40:00] be a ballplayer. Right. But he has an incredibly inquisitive mind. He’s the best read human being I know. Every time I’ve suggested a book to him, he’ll say, “Oh, that was okay, but you really gotta read this one.”

You know, he became a fabulous golfer. He did woodwork. He knows more about wine than anybody I know. He rode horses all through North Carolina. He had the imagination to think and to insist that the life after baseball would be as interesting and as valuable as the one he led as Sandy Koufax, the perfect game pitcher.

Charlie Chieppo: So unlike so many of these guys, he could actually envision a life after baseball, which is so often-

Jane Leavy: Exactly …

Charlie Chieppo: one of the reasons why these- Exactly … why they say and say and say, ’cause they don’t know, they don’t know what life is gonna be like without it

Jane Leavy: anymore. And you didn’t see him, I mean, he did sign a contract to do color commentary for NBC, uh-

Charlie Chieppo: Which he wasn’t so good at, as I recall.

Wasn’t-

Jane Leavy: He wasn’t, well, he [00:41:00] wasn’t comfortable. He’s, he’s not a misanthrope. Right. He’s not, you know, a standoffish, uppity guy. He’s just shy around people he doesn’t know. Mm-hmm. And so talking to an audience like that does not come easily or naturally. So what did he do? He did sign the 10-year contract. He quit and he gave back the money.

Charlie Chieppo: Yep. I remember that. I know. Could you imagine that today? And you wouldn’t-

Jane Leavy: you also, no. Okay. And you also didn’t see him, you know, shilling for anything. He didn’t do advertisements. He didn’t want to make a name off of Kosher ovens, nor did he want to be known or, you know, I mean, every Jewish organization in the world wanted him to campaign for whatever, bonds or Israel or UJA.

Sure. No. He didn’t want to, you know, make money or be known for doing that. As I said, he was a very Jewish being, and therefore, his refusal to pitch the first [00:42:00] game of the 1965 World Series because it landed on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the new year, persuaded people, well, he must be very religious.

Right. Must be very observant. No, he wasn’t. He was somebody who felt responsible to his community and to his parents. You know, he sat in his, his hotel room by himself. He didn’t go to synagogue, though many rabbis told me that he was in their congregation. And later, you know, after, some time after it was over, some writer friends I know saw him in the elevator of the team hotel eating a ham sandwich, and they were crushed.

Well, you know, one of the things about Judaism, and I say this as somebody who Sandy and I have a lot in common, I think perhaps only this way, you get to decide what kind of Jew you are. Right. Nobody tells you you have to do this, this, this, this, and this. And it’s very individual and it’s very personal, and there are no, you know…

I mean, yeah, if you’re kosher, [00:43:00] yeah, you’re not supposed to eat ham. But let’s be real, pigs aren’t as fetid and disgusting as they were when they wrote that in the Bible, you know? So people supposed a lot about his faith and talked about him as a great man of faith because he didn’t pitch on, on Yom Kippur.

In fact, he had never pitched on any of the high holidays ever. It just so happened that this one landed on Yom Kippur, and the day of the perfect game was the day they announced the first game of the World Series, and Sandy told reporters after that game they better pray for rain ‘Cause he was tell- he was telling them right then, if it’s on Yom Kippur, I’m not pitching.

Charlie Chieppo: Yep. Fascinating. Just so our listeners get a sense of him at his best, he was nicknamed the Left Arm of God, for those, for those of us who are old remember. And during his five-year, you know, really peak from ’62 to ’66, he became the first pitcher to be unanimously chosen as Cy Young winner, [00:44:00] ’63, ’65, and ’66.

Pitched four no-hitters in four consecutive seasons, ’62 through ’65. Led the National League in wins, ERA, and strike-outs in ’63, ’65, and ’66. And just the only thing I would add to that is for those of us who are really sort of baseball freaks, did it all for a team that didn’t score any runs. I mean, he rarely had, you rarely had much of a cushion.

Jane Leavy: Yeah, so Drysdale and Koufax hung a baseball from the ceiling of the Dodger locker room and pointed it out to their teammates and said, “This is a baseball. You’re supposed to hit it.”

Charlie Chieppo: That’s great. That’s great. I love that.

Jane Leavy: And I would point out, you know, he was the ultimate team guy.

Charlie Chieppo: Which is why he could do that, I would assume, and not have, not have them get angry at him.

Jane Leavy: Oh, yeah, and he was very close to Maury Wills. They used to sit and, uh, Maury would ice his knees and Sandy would have his elbow, left elbow plunged [00:45:00] in a tub of ice, and they would read each other their hate mail while they iced. But, you know, he was very much a team guy, and if you asked somebody who you wanted to pitch game seven of the ’65 World Series against the Twins- Mm

even though it was Drysdale’s turn and Sandy was pitching on two days’ rest for the second time in that series, everyone in that clubhouse wanted Koufax to pitch.

Charlie Chieppo: Probably including

Jane Leavy: Drysdale. By the way… No, I don’t think so. You know, I mean, the, the great story is that, and it’s t- again, typical of Sandy, he didn’t think it was such a big schmear that he didn’t pitch game one because after all, there was Drysdale, and they were known as One and One A.

Mm. And who would have thunk that Drysdale would get clobbered and Alston would go to the mound and say to take him out, and, and Drysdale would say, “Well, Skip, I bet you wish I was Jewish today, too, huh?” Because it was that bad. So from Sandy’s perspective, you know, so big schmear. I’ll get, I’ll pitch [00:46:00] game two.

They didn’t envision that they were gonna be going back to Los Angeles down two games to the Minnesota Twins. When they sat in the back of the plane and they laughed about it and said, “Oh, we really got ourselves in a mess here, didn’t we?” And that’s why Sandy pitched two games on two days’ rest, and threw two shutouts.

That statistic I never remember by heart is this: 97 times in his career, he had 10 strikeouts or more. Nine times he pitched on two days’ rest, seven of which were shutouts, six of which were complete games

Charlie Chieppo: Unbelievable. The last question I have will begin with one of my favorite quotes of all time, which is, “Trying to hit Sandy Koufax,” Hall of Famer Willie Stargell famously once said, “was like drinking coffee with a fork.”

I’d like to conclude by just having you tell us a little bit about Sandy’s post-baseball life and career, which obviously includes a legacy as baseball, a [00:47:00] Jewish-American, a man of principle. If you could just sort of touch on those things for a moment, that’d be great.

Jane Leavy: You know, he did sign a contract with NBC, 10 years to be a color commentator and, and he was terrible at it.

And so he gave the money back. And then he kind of, to the public perception, disappeared. In fact, what he did is he did all those things that he imagined he might be able to do in a life away from baseball. He became a great golfer, a great reader, a great horseback rider. He knows more about wine than anybody I know, and he’s read every book I’ve read and more.

And then he went back into baseball and he worked for the Dodgers in their minor league pitching system, teaching people. And, you know, among, among the people he worked with, the Martinez brothers, Pedro and, and Ramon, Hershiser. Even up till the last 10 years, he would go around, [00:48:00] particularly when Fred Wilpon owned the Mets, he would show up at the Mets and show them things, how he held the ball, how he placed his right rear foot in the spikes against the pitching rubber, not on top of it, and used that to gain leverage, pushing off against it instead of on top of it.

He also studied the physics of baseball and what worked. You know, he, the kinetic chain and how muscle had to ali- align with bone, and if it didn’t, you were fighting your, the body. You couldn’t make it work. Yeah, he drew me a picture explaining how it was a double catapult. He understood more about how the body worked, you know, and the demands of pitching than anybody I know.

And what’s happened today is they’ve gone a- away from those kind of mechanics, and it’s part of the reason you see they train different parts of the body not as a continuum with energy [00:49:00] generated from the legs and on, up, and out through those little fingertips, but they train them as separate entities You’re not getting

You, you know, E.B. White’s in the cool crystal stream of the English language. I think that’s the right- Yeah … well, you’re not getting the cool crystal stream of kinetic energy- Right … today either. He shakes his head at, as most old-timers do, at what they’re doing today. He worked for the Dodgers and resigned when Tommy Lasorda took over.

Tommy Lasorda still resented him from- Really? Wow … like 1955 Wow … when Koufax made the team and Tommy didn’t, ’cause there was only one left-hander they were gonna take, who was a- Mm-hmm … you know, a bonus baby. So he left there and he got married, he got divorced, he got married, he got divorced. And then he got married again to a wonderful woman who I refer to as the other Jane, and traveled and, you know, [00:50:00] saw the world, and showed up on TV, ’cause everybody would always find him at the Final Four.

Right. You know, he still loves basketball, and-

Charlie Chieppo: Still loves basketball, yeah …

Jane Leavy: and he celebrated his 90th birthday in December.

Charlie Chieppo: Yeah.

Jane Leavy: And, you know, I have to say I was a little curious about the timing of talking about Koufax now, and then I realized there’s no bad time to talk about Sandy.

Charlie Chieppo: There really isn’t, and there’s no bad time to talk about this book, Jane, because it’s just so fantastic.

Jane Leavy: Thank you.

Charlie Chieppo: Uh, just rereading it some last night, it was just such a pleasure. Makes me think of one final Koufax story you probably know. It’s always, always stuck with me. I remember in the ’90s when he was in his 60s, he went to Dodger Stadium and was just pitching batting practice and stuff, and, and they clocked him at, I think, like 86 when he was in his 60s, which is, uh, I just find an amazing story.

Jane Leavy: That was, I think, at spring training.

Charlie Chieppo: Spring training, okay. Yeah.

Jane Leavy: Yeah. I guess that’s true.

Charlie Chieppo: [00:51:00] Who knows? Who knows? Um,

Jane Leavy: you know, I wouldn’t put anything past him. You know, he’s not throwing any 86 mile an hour anything these days, but he doesn’t have to.

Charlie Chieppo: He, uh, he, yes, he … Well, Jane, this is fantastic. Thank you so much for coming back and for talking about this rich topic and this wonderful book.

We really appreciate it. Can we finish by just asking you to read one passage?

Jane Leavy: I’d be delighted to, and it’s … Yeah, I organized the book about Sandy according to the nine innings of his perfect game. Yes. Right. And this is from the eighth inning. Yeah. “Never before had he thrown a baseball with equal measures of control and velocity.

It was a confluence of experience and opportunity, muscle memory and kinetic understanding, reflex and thought.” Quite unexpectedly, in the eighth inning of his 349th Major League game, everything he had learned about [00:52:00] the physics of pitching and everything his own physiology enabled him to do was at his disposal.

He thought, “It’s as total as it’s ever been.”

Charlie Chieppo: Love it. Jane, thank you so much. We really appreciate you coming and visiting with us again.

Jane Leavy: My pleasure.

Take me out to

the ball game. If we don’t win, it’s a shame. ‘Cause it’s one-

Albert Cheng: Well, Charlie, I really enjoyed that interview. I know we have our teams to cheer, and I know if you’re a fan of a certain team, you have to have a certain amount of animosity to other teams. But look, I think I can appreciate greatness and excellence when we see it, especially on, on the baseball field. So this was fun.

Charlie Chieppo: Indeed it was. Indeed it was, James. Great.

Albert Cheng: Yeah, that’s right, Charlie, and I wanna thank you also for joining us on The Learning Curve again. Oh, my pleasure. You know, hopefully we get to have you back again soon.

Charlie Chieppo: All right, I’m [00:53:00] in.

Albert Cheng: But before we leave, everybody, and close out the show, we do wanna leave you with the tweet of the week.

This one comes from @NEXT, “Claiming the moral high ground for character education.” It is, in fact, a book review of a new book by Michael Rose, The Subversive Art of a Classical Education: Reclaiming the Mind in an Age of Speed, Screens, and Skill Drills. I research this stuff, so I’m gonna have to check out this book.

But anyway, I wanna refer the listeners at least to the review and then perhaps the book. And then of course, let me leave you with the guest for the next episode. We’re gonna have Allison Lacroix. She is the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law at the University of Chicago and author of The Ideological Origins of American Federalism.

So that should be another enlightening and fun discussion. And so until then, I wanna wish everyone a great day and a great week.