And here’s the pitch! Presenting the papers of veteran sportswriter Leonard Koppett

Sports archives are not a common sight in Stanford’s Special Collections, but here’s one for folks interested in both sports and journalism. Leonard Koppett (1923-2003) was a sportswriter and author with a nearly six-decade career. Born Leonid J. Kopeliovitch in Moscow, Koppett grew up in New York City, initially in the Bronx near Yankee Stadium. Beginning in the late 1940s he worked for the New York Herald Tribune and New York Post before moving to the New York Times in 1963. Ten years later Koppett relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, becoming the Times' first west coast sports correspondent. He then wrote for Palo Alto’s Peninsula Times Tribune, assuming the role of executive sports editor in 1980 and later editor-in-chief. He was also a longtime columnist for The Sporting News, a weekly based in St. Louis. Many people know Koppett from his twenty-plus books, especially A Thinking Man's Guide to Baseball (later titled The Thinking Fan's Guide to Baseball).

Koppett's papers were for many years what we call "open but unprocessed" with an extremely basic (and not entirely accurate) box-level description. We are very happy to report that the collection is now fully processed and has a detailed finding aid – yet another yield from a massive move/backlog project. Koppett’s collection, while technically available, was not in a very usable state; nearly half consisted of multiple unsorted photocopies of articles. Several boxes of unlabeled notes and charts went into a Statistics series; these files do contain items of interest such as Koppett’s game daybooks with Yankees and Dodgers score cards from the 1950s. But perhaps most valuable for researchers is Koppett’s comprehensive archive of columns and articles, which seemed to be published almost daily. We had to make a decision about whether to sort these chronologically or by subject (in case you were only interested in, say, his editorials on the Olympics); in the end it made the most sense to arrange by date alone.

Koppett's letter files include a range of correspondents, from various officials, managers, coaches and players, to reader fanmail and feedback. One file contains a rather contentious exchange with Jackie Robinson. Koppett’s drafts and published columns on Robinson are arranged by date in his Writing series. Additional correspondence can be found in Koppett’s Journalism series, including letters and memoranda from fellow sportswriters, editors, and management. Among the interesting non-sports material that emerged from this closer look was a New York Times internal policy memo from 1970 about Times journalist Earl Caldwell. Caldwell was being tried for withholding information from the F.B.I. after he wrote an article on the Black Panthers in Oakland.

Music and drama was a passionate avocation for Koppett, and while a member of the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers' Association of America he wrote, directed and starred in several satirical productions at their annual banquet. The collection contains typescript drafts, scripts, songs, photographs, and audio recordings of the shows.

Living and working in Palo Alto, Koppett naturally wrote a great deal about local teams, including articles about Stanford’s athletic program, although his interest in collegiate sports dates back to the notorious point-fixing scandals of the 1950s. Koppett also taught and lectured at Stanford and San Jose State, including Stanford Law classes with William B. Gould IV. 

Koppett’s writing and research reveal a deep involvement with the legal and economic aspects of sports as opposed to just straight reportage. This long-game philosophical approach was not always welcomed by readers; one early letter basically told him to “cut the blather, just tell me who won!” However, Koppett’s style, which he also applied to his general editorializing, provided a welcome, non-partisan reasonability to the news. To which it might be said; “people just don’t write like that anymore!”