Meet Koufax, the band

When you name your band Koufax, you better have a good repertoire -- especially a live fastball.

The band with the same moniker as the last name of the legendary Dodgers left-hander Sandy Koufax has been winning fans and pleasing critics in the indie rock world for almost a decade. And their latest album, Strugglers, was released in late September to rave reviews.

As multi-instrumentalist Dustin Kinsey says, the genesis of the name came from band leader Rob Suchan, who lived in Brooklyn, N.Y., when he put the group together.

"Rob was living in Brooklyn, hanging out at a bar, and they were talking about what to name the band," Kinsey says. "Someone said, 'You should name the band Koufax,' and sure enough, it stuck."

Since then, the group has put out four albums, including Strugglers, which was written by Suchan last year while living in Prague, Czech Republic. They've also been road warriors, touring internationally over the last eight years and sharing stages with big names such as Wilco, Bright Eyes, Nada Surf, The Get Up Kids and the Smoking Popes.

Kinsey is the real baseball fan in the band, having grown up in Fayetteville, Ark. as a big St. Louis Cardinals fan. At the time, the Cardinals' Double-A team played in Little Rock, and Kinsey would go see future Cards stars during their developmental years.

Some of those players helped provide Kinsey with his greatest and most recent thrill when the underdog Cardinals won the 2006 World Series over the Detroit Tigers.

"That was absolutely unexpected," Kinsey says. "I had unfortunately felt the sting of the loss (to Boston) two years prior and thought it would be forever until the Cardinals got back. And after going to games in the early to mid-1980s when they were there every year, that one really sort of came out of nowhere.

"I was ecstatic to say the least, watching every game."

Kinsey says he still tries to go to games when Koufax is on the road, another reason why he's proud to play in a band with a name that's so closely tied to the history of the Grand Old Game.

"There's a lot of mystique to the name in the sense that Sandy Koufax quit at the top of his game and was the most dominant pitcher for that period of the game," Kinsey says.

"I'm always asked about the name, and it's cool to tell people who he was if they don't know. Of course, most of them do know."

Kinsey now keeps himself entertained by envisioning titles for future baseball-inspired albums that will go hand in hand with the Koufax brand.

"Maybe we could do an album and call it Albert Pujols, just to confuse people," he says with a laugh.

"Or maybe have an album named after a bunch of great players -- one per decade decade starting back in the 1880s or something. Start with Christy Mathewson and see what we can do."

For now, he'll continue to help make Koufax a band with a big sound and bigger dreams.

"A gold record or a platinum record would be amazing," Kinsey says. "And if I could parlay that into a meeting with Koufax himself, believe me, I wouldn't turn it down."