Sandy Koufax

"This is just a wonderful biography of one of the great pitchers of baseball history. Mostly the 60s. His real prime was the mid-1960s. Again, we’re talking about a very different era, with civil rights, with Vietnam in the air. There was this different kind of feel in America. Koufax was this heroic figure. What I love about the book is that, again, it’s definitely not just about sports. Jane Leavy starts the book by saying what a pride Sandy Koufax was to Jewish people, and what a pride he was to her when she was young. He was not only a great Jewish athlete – of which there haven’t been that many in baseball history – but he was proudly Jewish. He sat out for Yom Kippur during the World Series. He stood out, in a way, for that time. She talks about religion, she talks about the stance he took on it and of course she talks about what an amazing pitcher he was. He grew up in Brooklyn and ended up playing for the Dodgers. Then the Dodgers moved out to LA as the country was expanding. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Again, what connects all these books is their connection to American history. I really like that. I wouldn’t call myself a history buff, because I don’t know enough about history to say that. But I love reading about history. The books that connect baseball to a time and place in America are the ones that move me most. I’ve tried! I made a specific effort to do that. I could name 50 baseball books that I’ve loved to read, but what I really wanted to do was try to capture something. I’ve done a lot of reading – and even writing myself – about the Negro Leagues, where African-Americans used to play before Jackie Robinson. There have been some wonderful books about the Negro Leagues. But I felt that with The Boys of Summer I got quite a lot about Jackie Robinson already, so I wanted to move to different eras, to try to capture a little bit of the century. I really think so. I think baseball now is every bit as great, if not greater in many ways, than it ever was. I wrote a book about Buck O’Neil, who was this great Negro Leagues player and manager, and a wonderful, wonderful man. People would always say to him, “You must really miss the days when baseball was… whatever, in the 50s or 60s.” He’d always say, “No. Baseball is still baseball”. I think that’s exactly right. Baseball has this staying power. The scandals are part of the game – whether it’s the steroid scandal of the 90s, or the slow-moving efforts to bring African-Americans and dark-skinned Latin players into the game in the 50s, or the gambling scandals of the teens. Those have always been a part of the game, but the game has always endured. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It began in the mid-70s. That’s when the union, led by Marvin Miller, really started to assert itself and they won a big court battle. It’s funny, because players started making as much as $100,000, and people were outraged. Then suddenly players were making $1m and people were outraged. Then they were making $5m-10m. Now there are players making $25m-30m a year. At every step along the way, there has been this extraordinary outrage. It’s moved very quickly, but even though it has moved very quickly, at every stage it has felt like a new story to people. People now complain about how much money players make. They don’t realise that they’re basically saying exactly the same thing that people have been saying for the past 40 years."