Pitch Perfect: An Interview with Author Jonah Winter

Many people think that Sandy Koufax is the greatest left-handed pitcher of all time. But I recently heard some callers on a talk radio program question whether he deserved to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame. To me, that's like wondering if…
Jesus belongs in the Bible? I don't know, he's the son of God, but what has he done for us lately?

Why is Koufax so great?

Willie Stargell, the former Pittsburgh Pirate slugger, once said that “hitting a Koufax fastball was like trying to drink coffee with a straw.”
I love that quote. Koufax was pitching before the era of radar guns, so we don't know how fast his fastballs were. I first became aware of baseball when I was around six years old, in 1968, so unfortunately I missed out on actually watching Koufax pitch. But from the film clips I've seen, it seems like he was a phenomenon that was almost otherworldly.

In the film The Big Lebowski, there's a funny scene in which John Goodman says that Judaism is “3,000 years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax.”
That's one of my favorite films. I think it's undeniable the kind of icon Koufax is in Jewish culture. At the time he was playing, there were only about 10 other Jewish players. The prejudice Koufax experienced was a more subtle thing than what Jackie Robinson or Roberto Clemente or any number of other guys in the 1950s went through. It's certainly one of the things that might have shaped his persona and set him apart from other players.

You've written about Dizzy Gillespie, Gertrude Stein, Muhammad Ali, and many other exceptional people. How do you distill a complex person's life into a 32-page children's picture book?
Some friends of mine look at the length of the books I write and they just think, 'Wow, what a racket!' But truthfully, what you just said is the main challenge. The first thing you know when you're setting out to write a picture book is that you can't possibly tell the whole life story in 32 pages. My goal is to find one story that has both meaning for me emotionally and is something kids can really relate to—and then almost willfully scrape away everything that's not essential to the story.

Before you began writing kids' books, you were a member of a rock band, a flower deliverer, and a llama farmer. Did those experiences prepare you for your present vocation?
Oh, absolutely. Many years ago, when I was still shopping a résumé around, looking for jobs, I would put the llama ranch experience right at the top.

I can see how that might open a lot of doors.
It actually did. My girlfriend at the time was just horrified that I was doing this and thought that this was yet another example of self-sabotage. My job duties included—let's see, I'm trying to quote my résumé—banked hay, built fence, hosed out the barn, kept an eye on the llamas.

You're also a poet and a musician. Before your mom, author-illustrator Jeanette Winter, asked for your help on a book about Diego Rivera, it sounds like you resisted going into the family business.

You're absolutely right. If you had asked me when I was in college, or even graduate school, if I thought I'd be doing children's books, I would have started laughing. I wanted to be Rimbaud and write decadent poems for adults. But I'm becoming more focused on children's books, and it's becoming more of a passion for me. I'd say in the last two years, it's the center of my life.