Two Bad Books about Two Great Baseball Players

Jane Leavy is a sportswriter who used to work for the Washington Post, and who has had the very clever idea of trying to imitate David Maraniss's masterful biography of Vince Lombardi, When Pride Still Mattered. In 2005, Leavy published Sandy Koufax: A Life, and in 2010 she followed this with The Last Boy, a biography of Mickey Mantle. The idea was very clever indeed, as I believe each book has sold quite well. That's a real shame, as these two American legends deserve much better treatment.

On the surface, each book closely follows the Maraniss formula. There is the iconic photograph on the cover of the book. There is the discussion of changing societal norms in the 1960s. There is earnest analysis of the subject's parentage, ethnic heritage, and personality. There are the explanations about how the sporting press was becoming less supine and more confrontational in the early- to mid-1960s. And there is a sort of "what does it all mean" Big Think quality to the whole work, as if Koufax and Mantle can help us understand American Life in the Twentieth Century.

But there are several problems with Leavy's efforts to imitate Maraniss. First, while Vince Lombardi actually did have a fascinating psychology -- marinated in the rich sauce of Italian culture, Jesuit theology, and a fascination with the military -- Koufax and Mantle appear to be fairly normal men who just happened to be great athletes. Leavy tries to make much of Koufax's decision not to play on Yom Kippur and to walk away from baseball at the age of 30 -- but many people choose not to work on the holiest day of the Jewish year, and Barry Sanders and Jim Brown also chose to leave sport on their own terms. As for Mantle, he appears to have had exactly the type of life described in thousands of country music songs -- just as you would expect from someone who grew up dirt poor in Oklahoma -- but Leavy treats each revelation (Mantle drank! He was loyal to unstable friends! He cheated on his wife! He had problems with authority! He was distant from his kids!) as if Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Cash hadn't told this same story countless times.

Second, Maraniss is a thoughtful student of history who realizes that not everything is at simple as it appears. For example, he realizes that liberalism was not the only political movement of the 1960s -- and that the cult surrounding Vince Lombardi's discipline and hard work was, in some ways, a sign that many ethnic types in the North were on their way to becoming Reagan Democrats. Leavy, by contrast, writes about American history with all the understanding of someone who watched a few episodes of Schoolhouse Rock. Civil rights movement (Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays) good! Old white guys (Walt Alston, Casey Stengel) bad! Old press corps (clubby drunks who cover up for the boys) bad! New press corps (angry young men who are snarky about sports) good! Because her descriptions of American life in the 1950s and 1960s are so cartoonish, the reader can't take seriously her views on what Mantle and Koufax tell us about those periods. (For that matter, do they really tell us anything about those periods? These were two charming and charismatic men who were in the World Series almost every year between 1951 and 1966, and who played for two of those famous franchises in baseball. They were also clutch performance who shone in the spotlight. Wouldn't they be enormously famous at any period in baseball history -- including our own?)

Third, Maraniss does an excellent job of seriously engaging with Lombardi's football life -- showing us what parts of the game he learned from others and what no innovations he developed, explaining in careful detail exactly what it was that made his teams so successful. Leavy is so anxious to get on with her personal gossip and pop sociology that she fails to fully develop the only truly interesting facts about Mantle and Koufax -- the ones that relate to their otherworldly skill as baseball players. She mentions that Bill James (the reigning genius of baseball analysis) reports that Mantle in his prime was better than Mays in his prime -- but she never explains why and, indeed, she acts as though James doesn't know what he's talking about. She mentions that Koufax pitched a vast number of innings each year from 1963 to 1966 -- far more than anyone would throw today -- but she never satisfactorily explains why he was used in this manner, or what his career might look like if he pitched today.

Of all her faults, I believe this last -- Leavy's failure to take the baseball part of her biography seriously -- is the worst. Baseball researchers actually know a lot more about Mickey Mantle and Sandy Koufax than anyone did 20 or even 40 years ago -- they have invented countless new statistics that allow us to study anyone's career in much greater detail than was previously possible. Indeed, much of their work is specifically designed to help us compare baseball players across time -- to see, for example, how Koufax and Mantle would do in today's game. Leavy appears to have some knowledge of this work (at least she mentions some of it in the Mantle book -- maybe the stats geeks got in touch with her after the Koufax book) but for the most part she is content to cycle through the same highlight reels that I read about back in the 1970s. Countless questions that baseball fans would care about -- what was the difference between Casey Stengel and Ralph Houk, how good was Roger Maris (really), how long might Koufax have lasted if he threw 200 innings per year -- are barely mentioned or ignored to make room for stories about guys from the old neighborhood who remembered Sandy or The Mick. This is a real shame; given the publicity surrounding these books, it is unlikely that any publisher will order up another book on Mantle or Koufax in the near future, meaning that the opportunity to illuminate their careers for the current generation has been lost.

In conclusion, the Leavy books show that while there is certainly a place for the type of serious sports biography represented by Maraniss's book on Lombardi, such a book requires a lot more time and effort -- and a lot more respect for the actual sport at issue -- than has been shown here. The baseball fan who is truly curious about Koufax and Mantle would be wise to simply pull out his copy of Bill James's Historical Baseball Abstract, and leave these books on the shelf.

Not recommended.