Which is less topical: a piece about 137 year old Cy Seymour during the winter meetings, or a review of a seven year old book? Eh. Either way, it's my blog.

I finally got around to picking up Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy by Jane Leavy, which I've wanted to read since about the time it was published. And I just wanted to take a moment to recommend it. If you're reading this, and you haven't read it, you should. You'd like it.

Leavy (whose work I don't think I'd ever been exposed to in any form before picking up this book) is or was a columnist for The Washington Post, and has a background as a sportswriter, but this feels like neither a sports book nor a biography written by a newspaper writer (both of which I think have distinctive and usually kind of negative associations for me). Oh, it is a biography, and it's got plenty of sports in it (actually, the book's very clever construction features substantive "life" chapters alternating with chapters which each describe an inning of the most memorable game of Koufax's career).

Most of the difference is Leavy's writing style. The book's brilliantly evocative phrasing makes it a quick and easy read while also being an incredibly enriching experience. For someone who was minus-thirteen years old when Koufax retired, the description and level of detail that makes you feel like you're there -- not that you're Koufax (who could imagine?), but that you're the kid in the stands with the scorecard or the backup catcher or first base coach, maybe -- is almost impossible to accomplish, but throughout almost the entire book, Leavy does it. 

Also, it's the angles she takes and the work she put in. She didn't stick to the obvious interviews, and in fact seems to try to avoid them. And Koufax scarcely cooperated at all, which was probably a blessing. Instead, we get the people who were there to see him pitch, the neighbors who grew up with him, things most writers might only touch on in passing, if at all. And perhaps best of all, we get a real sense of (a) what he meant, and continues to mean, to so many Jewish families in America; and (b) the daily hell that Koufax had to put himself through in order to be Sandy Koufax. My very favorite passage:  

Pitching is trauma. The human elbow may be God's greatest invention but He didn't anticipate a major league fastball during those first seven days. The moment of maximum stress, the subject of so many grim-great photographs, occurs just as a pitcher finishes cocking his arm and it begins to accelerate forward. The elbow is flexed 85 to 95 out of a possible 150 degrees, the anatomical arc just shy of a semicircle. The change of direction, as the arm propels itself forward, is an insult to flesh and bone. It lasts, scientists now know, no more than 3/100ths of a second. But in that wisp of time, the arm is moving at a speed of 7,000 degrees per second. At that rate, the second hand of a clock would complete nineteen and a half revolutions in a tick of a clock. The elbow is subjected to what doctors call 'maximum load' as two contrary forces, momentum and inertia, converge on the joint. The medical name for this violation is a 'valgus torque.' It causes ligaments to stretch like salt water taffy on a hot summer day.

See? This is great stuff. Even when it's joints and physics and "valgus torque," it's also poetry.

It's not without its flaws. Leavy talks a lot about how our memories of what was so often mingle with our ideas of what should have happened. And that's a fascinating topic, and never more evident than it is in old baseball stories, especially revolving around a legend like Koufax. But I also get the sense that, while she's fact-checked and rebuffed some of those stories, there are others that she was told by her various interviewees that she just accepted and put out there as fact. There's an air of almost-truth about a lot of the book. And sometimes she gets too carried away with the vivid imagery and seems to love track of what she's actually saying.

But not often. It's a great story and a great book about a great and very, very different dude. If you're a baseball fan and you haven't read this book, read this book.