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Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy By Jane Leavy

1513 Words7 Pages

In Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, Jane Leavy does her best to bring to light the incredible Sandy Koufax. Koufax was one of baseball’s greatest pitchers, and could be considered the best. He is also one of the sport’s biggest mysteries. He doesn't do interviews with people that are trying to write biographies about him. But Leavy was able to gain access to hundreds of interviews with friends, teammates, family members, and acquaintances of Koufax. With those interviews she was able to give us information on Koufax’s personal history and life, while also emphasizing his life in baseball. Leavy also links Koufax’s life experience to changes which have taken place in both professional baseball and society at that time. But Leavy never fully …show more content…

There isn’t much to suggest that he was a selfish man, but he does always seem to keep himself first. Koufax loved baseball but he wanted his life without it to be just as good. He often talked about and looked forward to things outside of baseball. Was holding out for more money just him preparing for the future or was he actually looking to change the game? Well, he ended up doing both. Changing the game is subtle at that point, but looking back at it now, you can see how all the deals and haggles from the players back then got us to where we are now. His deal to sign for 125,000 dollars was groundbreaking to the players being able to fight for their rights to get paid more and to be traded. Basically what would lead into Free Agency some ten years later. Koufax and Drysdale’s gimmick was that neither one of them would sign unless the other one did. Koufax was originally trying to get close to a million dollars split between them but that was shot down quickly. The only reason that the gimmick worked was because of the talent level of these two pitchers. But the point is that it worked and then Koufax retired after his 1966 season. To all of his fans disappointment and sadness, Koufax decided to retire at the age of 30. Leavy talks about all the primitive training methods that they used on Koufax’s elbow. Rubbing a chili powder mash on it and it would burn and smell so bad that people couldn't be around him. I would compare that to an early form of IcyHot. Whether he had more left in him is up to the man himself. He was able to walk away from the game at a young age with a plethora of accomplishments. Four no hitters, including a perfect game. Three Cy Young awards, three World Series titles, seven time all-star, and league MVP, just to name a few. These accomplishments and the age at which he retired allowed him to be

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