In an era when too many heroes have been toppled from too many pedestals, Sandy Koufax stands apart and alone, a legend who declined his own celebrity. As a pitcher, he was sublime, the ace of baseball lore. As a human being, he aspired to be the one thing his talent and his fame wouldn't allow: a regular guy. A Brooklyn kid, he was the product of the sedate and modest fifties who came to define and dominate baseball in the sixties. In Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, former award-winning Washington Post sportswriter Jane Leavy delivers an uncommon baseball book, vividly re-creating the Koufax era, when presidents were believed and pitchers aspired to go the distance. He was only a teenager when Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley proclaimed him "the Great Jewish Hope" of the franchise. But it wasn't until long after the team had abandoned Brooklyn that the man became the myth. Old-fashioned in his willingness to play when he was injured and in his acute sense of responsibility to his team, Koutax answered to an authority higher than manager Walter Alston. When he refused to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, he inadvertently made himself a religious icon and an irrevocably public figure. A year later, he was gone -- done with baseball at age thirty. No other sports hero had retired so young, so well, or so completely. Despite Sandy Koufax's best efforts to protect his privacy, his legend has grown larger ever since. Part biography, part cultural history, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy gets as close to that legend as he will allow. Through meticulous reporting and interviews with five hundred of his friends, teammates, and opponents, Leavy penetrates the mythology to discover a man more than worthy of myth.

Jane Leavy has always loved baseball. Her grandmother lived one long, loud foul ball away from Yankee Stadium--the same grandmother who took young Jane to Saks Fifth Avenue and bought her her first baseball glove. It's no coincidence that Leavy was covering the game she loved for the Washington Post by the late 1970s. As a pioneering female sportswriter, she eventually turned her talent to books, penning three of the all-time best baseball biographies about three of the all-time best players: Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, and Babe Ruth. But when she went searching for a fourth biographical subject, she realized that baseball had faltered. The Moneyball era of the last two decades obsessed over data and slowed the game down to a crawl, often at the expense of thrills, skills, and surprise. Major League Baseball has begun to address issues too long ignored, yet the questions linger: how much have these efforts helped to improve the game and reassert its place in American culture? Leavy takes a whirlwind tour of the country seeking answers to these questions, talking with luminaries like Joe Torre, Dave Roberts, Jim Palmer, Dusty Baker, and more. What Leavy uncovers is not only what's wrong with baseball--and how to fix it--but also what's right with baseball, and how it illuminates characters, tells stories, and fires up the imagination of those who love it and everyone who could discover it anew.