Sandy Koufax

by Jane Leavy

  Rising, he turned to an easel and drew a simple figure: >. Then he added a series of lines fanning out from the upper arm so that > became /. His drawings are famous. They circulate through baseball’s underground, accompanied by the whispered awe usually reserved for great art. Truth to tell: Koufax may have painted the corners but he’s no Matisse. His audience had no clue what they were looking at. “This is usually my quiz,” he said, apologetically. “But in the interest of time I’ll give you the answer.”

  “While it may look ridiculous, that’s a pitcher from the start of his windup to the finish when he releases the ball. What’s happening is the hips get out front and you create some energy by leaving the upper part of your body behind.”

  Using his Magic Marker, he directed their attention to the second to last of the fanned lines. “The most critical point is right about here. The front leg is charged with stopping the torso. When the torso stops, the arm catches. You’ve now multiplied the force factor. So the arm now develops more speed than it had when it was simply moving with the body. It’s the law of the flail. It’s somewhere between six and eight to one, I don’t remember; I have it at home.

  “In the Middle Ages when they first had catapults, they had the single-arm catapult. It’s a simple ratio: the length of the catapult to the speed. Then some guy—I don’t know who the hell it was—said, ‘Hey, how about one with two shorter arms?’ They threw that stone six times as far. He’s thinking: Hey, we’re throwing rocks on these guys and they can’t reach us. So basically that’s what happens with the body. It’s a two-armed catapult. You try to get the front half out as far as you can. All power pitchers do that. When the front leg stops, the upper body catches, the arm straightens, and you see a straight line. Basically, you try to work as much as you can with leverage and weight and energy rather than having to use the force of the muscles to perform those actions that just letting your body get in the right position will take care of. You get the work done by leverage and weight rather than force. You gotta do what the bones do.”

  “Form follows function,” Louis Henri Sullivan wrote in 1896. He was referring to architecture, but he might as well have been talking about Koufax. He embodied the principle. His form, evolved over twelve major league seasons, was ideally suited to its function. First he perfected it. Then he learned to repeat it. Finally, he came to understand and articulate the physical laws implied in what he did.

  His delivery was the kinetic equivalent of E. B. White’s “clear, crystal stream” of the English language: honed, pared down, essential. Every pitch landed like a punch line. He flowed. There were no glitches or hitches; no Brooklyn shrugs. Photographers and painters, with their ability to freeze a moment in a stop-action sequence of images, could isolate elements of his delivery—the high leg kick, the grotesque torque of his elbow, the pinched contortion of his eyes at the instant before release. These are powerful images. They are also misleading. A motion doesn’t stop. It is a continuum.

  Today, biomechanical researchers like Jobe’s colleague, Dr. Marilyn Pink, use computer-enhanced telemetry to analyze a pitcher’s motion. When she performed a “qualitative visual analysis” of Koufax’s form in her lab at Centinela Hospital in Los Angeles, she discovered what batters already knew: He was biomechanically perfect. “There was absolutely not a wasted piece of energy there,” Pink concluded. “He knew exactly what was extraneous and what was needed.”

  The beauty of his delivery was a function of his mechanics and his mechanics were a function of obeying the laws of nature. Every pitch came over the top. He didn’t drop down. He didn’t come sidearm. He didn’t fool around. His fluidity lulled minds and dulled reflexes. Let the body put you to sleep and let the arm get you out, he would say. No matter how many times a batter saw it, the ball’s arrival at home plate always came as a shock. It was a humbling, disorienting sensation. In the immortal words of Willie Stargell, trying to hit Koufax was like “trying to drink coffee with a fork.” Hitters talk about it all the time and invariably in the same words. The ball presented itself as an offering. It was right there. I was right on it. And, then, nope, good-bye, it was gone.

  Andy Etchebarren, the Baltimore catcher who was the last batter ever to face him, quickly assessed the problem. “See, you need a certain amount of time for the eye to see what it sees and to tell the brain what it needs to be told and then your hands gotta move. And that is all taking place in less than a second. With Koufax, your eyes couldn’t tell your brain to react in time.”

  Many hitters revert to the present tense in an effort to describe the experience of facing him. It’s almost as if they are frozen in the long-ago moment just as they were frozen at the plate. “Koufax had the purest delivery,” said Tim McCarver, the former catcher better known as a TV announcer to a new generation of baseball fans. “There’s no deception in trying to pick the ball up. That’s what made Koufax Koufax. It was like one muscle throwing the ball.

  “With Koufax the left arm goes up and everything’s connected, a flowing unit coming toward you. The curveball was biting down and the fastball was exploding up. You had to look up and down, up and down—it was a very difficult thing for a hitter to adjust to.”

  Talk to guys who faced him and they all say pretty much the same thing: “You know, he only had two pitches.” Of course, as Willie Mays points out, “He threw them very well.” And he threw them from the same place, the same angle, the same motion. You didn’t know which was which until one went up and the other went down. The curve mesmerized and seduced; the fastball inspired awe and onomatopoeia: Ptoom. Psssst. Whchooo. Woooo. Wssszzzzzzt. Or, as Ralph Branca put it with rhetorical flourish: “How did Koufax pitch? Whoosh. Whoosh. WHOOSH!” He never believed in a change of pace. If he needed to change speeds, he figured he’d just throw harder.

  “He didn’t have to think too much,” Jim Bouton concluded after watching him disarm the Bronx Bombers in the 1963 World Series. “He just had to decide whether to throw his overpowering, overwhelming fastball or his off-the-table curveball. Of course, either one would have been fine. The fact that he threw both with the same grace and the same beautiful delivery was hypnotizing. Nobody knew how fast he was. I spoke to him once or twice. His style of speaking and his manner was the same as his pitching motion: all of a piece, seamless and smooth. It looked like one of those jumbo jets coming in for a landing. They look so huge and graceful that they look really slow but of course they’re coming in as fast as any other plane.”

  Koufax’s fastball inspired scientific debate, pitting the empiricism of the batting eye against scientific principle. The laws of physics and logic dictate that an object hurtling through space must lose height and momentum. Anyone can make a Whiffle ball rise, sure. But a man standing on a fifteen-inch-high mound of dirt throwing a five-ounce horsehide sphere downhill? “Rise, my butt,” Roseboro, the skeptic, says.

  Hitters scoff at science. Their expert testimony is unanimous.

  Stan Musial: “Rose up just before it got to the plate.”

  Willie Mays: “I don’t know how much it rose, it just rose. Ain’t got time to try and sit there and count how high it goes. You just know it went up—very quickly.”

  Hank Aaron: “It did something, you know?”

  Pitchers, coaches, and umpires concur.

  Carl Erskine: “It reaccelerated. It came again.”

  Dave Wallace: “Fifteen feet from home plate where the grass ends and the dirt begins, it got an afterburner in its ass.”

  Doug Harvey: “I don’t know why or how. In thirty-one years, I’ve never seen anybody else that could do that. Nolan Ryan’s ball did not do it. Jim Maloney’s ball did not do it. I’m talking hard throwers—Gibson, Seaver. Nobody’s ball did what Koufax’s ball did.”

  It was enough to make you question your sanity, if not your eyesight. During the 1965 World Series, Koufax threw five consecutive fastballs past Tony Oliva—a dead fastball hitter. After the series, Oliva went straight to the eye doctor. “The d
octor said, ‘Nothing is wrong with your eyes, Tony, you have the best eyes on the club,’” Oliva recalled. “Everybody on the club just laughed.”

  A ball in flight is subject to three forces: gravity, which accelerates movement downward; drag, which impedes forward motion; and lift. Lift is created by backspin, which vies with gravity for control over the trajectory of the ball. According to science, gravity always wins, causing a ball to drop three feet over the distance of sixty feet six inches. Physicists insist that the hop on Koufax’s fastball was an optical illusion created by the expectation that it would drop more than it did. “Physics is full of shit,” said another expert on the subject, Jim Bunning, a Hall of Fame pitcher who graduated to the United States Senate. “Physics also said you can’t throw a curveball. And I guarantee you his ball when he threw a curve did very un physical things.”

  If Koufax’s fastball defined him in the popular imagination, his curveball distinguished him in the minds of major league hitters. They had a whole vocabulary to describe his curve and what it did to them. They called it an overhand drop. (Started at twelve, finished at six.) They called it a yellow hammer. They called it a biter and they called it a bitch. Mostly, they called it unfair. It started a foot over your head and headed south in a hurry. Hitters swore it broke two feet. From the letters to the knees. From the table to the floor. From heaven to God’s green earth. They said it fell out of the sky.

  Guys would swing at it like they were chopping wood and end up hitting only the plate. Juan Marichal once broke his bat in half that way. It fooled batters, umpires, and sometimes his own catcher. The first time Jimmy Campanis, Al’s kid, caught Koufax, he stood up to catch the ball and it hit him in the knee.

  Some came to regard his curveball as an act of God, a force of nature. “A mystic waterfall,” Jimmy Wynn called it. Mystic? Surely he meant misty. “Either one,” the Toy Cannon replied. “It makes your eyes water when you see it coming. And when you miss it or you take it for a strike, you walk back to the dugout and see guys hiding their mouths. You know they want to laugh at you, just saying to themselves, Thank you, Jimmy. I’m glad it was you, not me.”

  An average major league curveball rotates perhaps twelve or thirteen times on its journey to home plate. Pitcher Al Leiter swears you can count the revolutions on Koufax’s curve by slowing old footage to a crawl. He also swears: “It’s up to fourteen or fifteen!” Which Leiter’s old pitching coach, Wallace, says is a little high.

  When it was right, you could hear it coming. “It sounded like a little tornado,” said Orlando Cepeda. “Bzzzzzzzz. And it looked like a high fastball. Then it dropped—BOOM—in front of you. So fast and so noisy, it scared you.”

  To understand how Koufax did what he did, it is necessary to see a ball in his hand. When Wallace tossed him one, it disappeared in his grasp. Wrapping the ball, players call it. Before middle age set in he could hold six balls in his hand. Or a friend’s infant grandson. A women’s size six and a half glove fits comfortably—in his palm. As former Dodger Rick Monday says, “When Sandy Koufax holds a baseball there’s no question who’s in control.”

  Koufax held the ball aloft to show the proper grip on the curveball: between the middle and ring fingers with his middle finger resting inside the long seam of the ball. His thumb, index finger, and even his ring finger were largely superfluous. He threw his curve off his middle finger, karate-chopping the air, pulling down on the seams with uncommon force and friction, thus generating unprecedented spin. “When you push back up, you’ve got to bend your wrist, hook it, so your hand is almost inside your arm,” he explained. “You can’t throw it as hard. You can’t spin it as fast pushing up as you can pulling back down.”

  Pulling down also places less stress on soft tissue and prevents the ball from popping up into view. In photos, you can see his thumb sticking straight up as if hitching a ride.

  Watching from the back of the room, Duke Snider hooted, “And we’re supposed to hit it, right?” Snider tried only once, his last season in the majors when he was playing out the string with the Giants in hateful Candlestick Park. He was trying to stay warm at the end of the dugout when manager Alvin Dark summoned him to pinch-hit for Willie McCovey, who had pulled a muscle swinging at a 3-and-1 pitch. “I said, ‘Alvin, are you out of your mind? I strike out quite often.’

  “He says, ‘He might walk you.’

  “I said, ‘I never thought of that.’ I went up and Sandy was laughing so hard he walked me. I said, ‘Thank you, Sandy.’”

  The hardest thing in sports is no single act, it is the replication of that act in an endless vacuum of infinite space. That is the ultimate discipline. In biomechanical terms, what made Koufax perfect was the ability to repeat a motion. Pitch after pitch. Batter after batter. Game after game.

  His control—so admired and so hard won—was a corollary to his body control. “As much as you can do to get the variables out of the delivery, the easier it is to repeat,” he explained. “That’s the key to a repeated golf swing, or pitching motion or batting swing. Hitters have the variable of not knowing where the ball is going to be. The pitcher wants to do exactly the same thing every time. He just wants to do it in a slightly different direction each time.”

  To call this a motion is misleading. A pitcher’s delivery, windup to follow-through, synthesizes a thousand separate physical acts, many of which occur simultaneously and all of which take place in approximately 3.68 seconds. Koufax learned to isolate and replicate the most crucial of them. “He thought it all through before science,” Pink said. “Now science has caught up with him and the data supports what he has known all along. He figured out some of the basic keys to throwing harder, faster, and more accurately early in the pitch. If you get them down, you can’t help but deliver the ball properly. How many arms has he saved? As many people as want to listen.”

  Koufax rarely speaks publicly about pitching. Jobe and his associates have tried to persuade him to collaborate on a pitching video, and taped this discussion for instructional use. His acolytes within baseball are noteworthy and numerous: Alan Ashby, Tim Belcher, Kevin Brown, John Franco, Orel Hershiser, Tim Leary, Al Leiter, Chan Ho Park, Kenny Rogers, Nolan Ryan, Dave Stewart, Don Sutton, Bob Welch. “This isn’t a philosophy,” says former major league manager Kevin Kennedy, another Koufax disciple. “It’s the way the body works.”

  Or, as Koufax has been known to say, Mechanics is what’s natural.

  “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” Koufax said, reminding his audience of Newton’s law of motion. When, in the course of delivering a pitch, a man applies force to the dirt in front of the mound, an equal but opposite force is applied by the ground to the pitcher. A stream of elastic energy is carried upward through the large muscles of the lower body and dispersed through the shoulder, the elbow, and the hand. A kinetic chain, it’s called.

  Think of a line of skaters whipping across a patch of ice. Each one represents a portion of a pitcher’s body—thigh, trunk, shoulder, arm. Their linked hands are joints and connective tissue. Each link in the chain is dependent on the others for speed and stability. They all rely on the anchor for security. If he wobbles, the chain breaks down. The skaters go nowhere—or go flying. But when they move in unison, like a set of interconnected levers, energy builds. That accumulated energy is transferred from skater to skater until it reaches the last man on line, who travels fastest and carries most of the force.

  The efficiency of Koufax’s motion generated greater than usual force. The anatomical advantages inherent in his impossibly long arms and fingers enhanced that efficiency. Maximized efficiency also meant maximized stress. Each pitch was an act of violence. Ironically, by making his body into the perfect catapult, he may have hastened the built-in obsolescence of his elbow.

  In baseball, a Great Arm is admired, massaged, milked, deified, and amortized. It is deferred to and referred to as if a thing apart. In fact, like the last skater on the imaginary line, it is a dependent.
The back leg is the controlling authority, in Koufax’s view, “the single most important thing in pitching.”

  As the batter dug in at the plate, Koufax wedged his back foot into the pitching rubber, inclining his ankle toward home. The angle was crucial. It created its own momentum, insisting that his body move forward in space. It was the source of the energy he was about to release.

  It remains a subject of esoteric debate in biomechanical circles whether a pitch begins with a push or a controlled fall off the pitching rubber. Koufax pushed. Flat feet can’t push. Most pitchers go into their windup with their back foot flat against the rubber, a passive approach. So ingrained is this orthodoxy, it took Hershiser three months practicing nothing else to get it right. Koufax finally told him to take the middle spike out of his shoe so he could wedge his foot into the rubber.

  The difference is as subtle as it is essential. By aligning muscle with bone, stress is minimized, force is maximized, and leverage is increased. “If your foot is at the angle you want it to be, your force is straight up that leg bone,” he said. “If you start in that position, there’s a lot more that you can do with the back leg a lot quicker. You’re already in a position to push. In fact, it automatically pushes your hips forward.”

  His front leg came up. The right knee, as it rose, seemed to touch his elbow. His toe extended like a dancer on point. For an instant, he seemed in equipoise, his back leg a pedestal. It was his only point of contact with the earth. Every other part of his body was flying.

  The angle also precludes what Koufax calls “an erratic and flexible base.” Joints are inherently unreliable, not to mention breakable, requiring timing and attention. Inclining his foot as he did eliminated his ankle as a variable while accelerating his forward motion.