Leonard Koppett

Leonard Koppett

• School Columbia University

• Born September 15, 1923 in Moscow, Russia
• Died June 22, 2003 in San Francisco, CA USA

Biographical Information

Len Koppett was an award-winning sportswriter based in New York, NY. He moved from Russia to New York as a boy. He was educated at Columbia University.

During a 55-year career, Koppett worked for several papers. His longest stints were 19 years with The Sporting News and 15 years with the New York Times. For the last decade of his life, he wrote strictly freelance pieces. He also wrote some 22 books about sports, including A Thinking Man's Guide to Baseball (1967), The Man in the Dugout (1993), and Koppett's Concise History of Major League Baseball (1998).

Koppett won the 1992 J.G. Taylor Spink Award and was posthumously honored with the Chadwick Award in 2019. He also received the Curt Gowdy Award from the Basketball Hall of Fame; he is the only writer honored by both the Baseball and Basketball Halls of Fame.

Further Reading

• Leonard Koppett: A Thinking Man's Guide to Baseball, Dutton Books, New York, NY, 1967. ISBN 978-1199112378
• Leonard Koppett: The Man in the Dugout: Baseball's Top Managers and How They Got That Way, Crown Publishers, New York, NY, 1993. ISBN 978-0517585450
• Leonard Koppett`: Koppett's Concise History of Major League Baseball, Carroll & Graf Publisher, New York, NY, 1998. ISBN 978-0786712861
• Dan Levitt: "Leonard Koppett", Baseball Research Journal, SABR, Vol. 48, Nr. 1, Spring 2019, pp. 105-106.

Related Sites

• Leonard Koppett at the SABR Bio Project