Jane Leavy is the author of biographies of Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle and a baseball novel, Squeeze Play. Before participating in a panel on how drugs have changed baseball, she talked Greek yogurt, Philip Roth, and the sunset over Cape Cod Bay in the Zócalo green room.
What’s your favorite cliché?
“It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”
What are you keeping in your closet that you should have thrown out already?
That is a really bad thing to ask a woman. The shoes I got married in the first time.
What’s your favorite baseball novel?
That’s really an unfair question. Well it isn’t Philip Roth[’s The Great American Novel], I can tell you that. It’s Steve Kluger—Last Days of Summer.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Don’t marry him.
What’s the last habit you tried to kick?
Biting my nails. And I did.
What do you eat for breakfast?
Fage, no-fat yogurt. Strawberries or blueberries. And a handful of almonds, because I read that that’s what social X-rays do. [Social X-rays?] The ladies on Park Avenue. Social V-rays is a phrase that debuted in the 1920s, not with Tom Wolfe.
What would the title of your biography be?
I can give you the idea, but the problem is I have to get the euphony right: She Didn’t Throw Like a Girl.
What do you proselytize for?
My children.
What inspires you?
Sunset over Cape Cod Bay.
What’s your favorite baseball stadium?
Well, it doesn’t exist anymore—the old, old Yankee Stadium. Not the renovated one, the new one that looks like a food court. The old, old Yankee Stadium, which was two blocks from my grandmother’s parlor on Walton Avenue in the Bronx. And if I sat very quietly under the grand piano in the living room, which had a broken leg, much like Mickey Mantle—a repaired leg, much like Mickey Mantle—I was approximately one very long, very loud foul ball from home plate, and so it was my favorite place to be.