by Jane Leavy
Rube Walker, the catcher, said, “Whatever he wants, give it to him. I wouldn’t let him get out of the clubhouse.”
Al Campanis Scouting Report September 17, 1954
* * *
Fast ball
A+
Curve
A+
Change (F.B.)
A–
Running Speed
O+
Control
A–
Definite Prospect?
Yes
Good velocity and life
77
Breaks sharply
72
A bit too fast
60
60
Remarks: Athletic build, good musculature.
Good poise and actions—smoother delivery—many clubs interested. Two are willing to make him a bonus player. Lad appears to possess confidence in himself. He has the tools. Whether or not to make him a bonus player is the question.
* * *
In 1954, “whatever he wants” was a relative term. The minimum major league salary was $6,000, club owners recently having rejected an attempt to raise it to $7,200. They had also vetoed a proposal to raise the pension for a ten-year veteran from $100 to $400 a month. A new bonus system was in place requiring any player signed for more than $4,000 to be kept on the major league roster for two years. General manager Buzzie Bavasi would make the final decision.
Campanis took Koufax home to Long Island to meet his family, introducing him as a future Hall of Famer. “It’s written all over him,” Al said. He visited Koufax’s parents at home, took them to the Latin Quarter, pleading the case for the home team. Eventually, the families became social friends. “My dad pushed Buzzie real heavy to keep him,” Jimmy Campanis said. “Buzzie had to make a decision to give him all that money and to keep him on the roster. Buzzie said, ‘Okay, Al, if you believe he’s going to be a superstar, I’ll agree with you.’”
Irving Koufax negotiated on behalf of his son. He asked for $20,000—$6,000 for the first year’s salary and a bonus of $14,000—the cost of a four-year college education. Bavasi remembered: “I called Arthur Dede and said, ‘Mr. Koufax wants fourteen thousand dollars—give it to him.’ When he was walking out of my office, Ed McCarrick of the Pirates came by and said, ‘Mr. Rickey told me to give you five thousand dollars more than the Dodgers offered.’ And his father said, ‘I can’t do that. We’ve already shook hands on it.’”
On Monday, December 6, Koufax wrote to McCarrick explaining his decision to sign with the home team.
I have been asked not [to] tell anyone of my decision until they announce it, but since I did promise you I would let you know first, I feel I can tell you without your betraying my confidence. I hope my decision, or anything else I’ve ever said doesn’t offend you…. Thank you for always being so honest and frank with me, in this cold business, where these few honest men are at a premium.
Koufax returned to Cincinnati with a major league contract in his back pocket. Jucker, who was a bird dog for the hometown Reds, tried to interest Birdie Tebbetts in giving Koufax a look but the manager refused. Jucker never spoke to him again. He sent him a couple of players, however.
Koufax had one more appointment to keep, a pro forma try-out with the Milwaukee Braves. He slept through it. He’d been up late the night before at the department store where he worked as a stock boy, and when he got to the hotel he fell asleep so soundly he didn’t hear repeated knocks on the door. A bellhop was dispatched to remove the door from its hinges. When he was awake enough to pitch, the Braves liked what they saw and offered him $30,000, which Koufax declined, honoring his handshake deal with the Dodgers.
The New York Times reported the transaction on December 14, the day after the Dodgers traded Preacher Roe and Billy Cox to Baltimore in order to clear space on the major league roster. Sports columnist Jimmy Cannon went to the Koufax home and reported that the diffident youngster seemed unfazed by this unlikely turn of events. Marv Raab remembers a very different Koufax: a skinny, lanky kid in a Lafayette sweatshirt standing outside Dubrow’s cafeteria, shaking hands and bragging, “I just signed with the Dodgers!” Raab was five years old. He never forgave his father, whose old-country manners wouldn’t permit asking for an autograph. In December 1954, parents still exercised restraint in such matters. (Raab waited ten years before getting one from the Dodgers.)
On January 7, 1955, Irving Koufax sent Bavasi a letter confirming the deal. Preserved behind glass in the Dodger Museum at Chavez Ravine, it is a model of courtliness. You can still see the impassioned punctuation—emphatic periods and commas—impressed upon the page with leverage and feeling.
Dear “Buzzie,”
I sincerely appreciate your gracious letter of the 4th instant.
To me it has always been a matter of deep satisfaction to be able to feel that I have earned the good will and respect of any person with whom I have had any contact. To have it confirmed was all the more heartwarming. Sandy doesn’t say much because he feels that he has yet to prove himself, but I know that he is proud to be a “Dodger” and that he will not throw this opportunity away. I earnestly hope that in time he will measure up to all of your expectations and fully justify the faith shown in him.
With all my good wishes for a great season for the Club and you personally for a successful and prosperous year, I am.
Very Sincerely,
Irving Koufax
P.S. I need hardly say that every Koufax, big and little, of close or remote degree of relationship and wheresoever situate, is now an earnest “Dodger” rooter and will follow the fortunes of the club with utmost interest.
Chapter 6
THE SECOND INNING
JOEY AMALFITANO WAS COMING DOWN the tunnel from the Cubs clubhouse when he heard the sound of the ball crashing into Torborg’s glove, pow! He’d taken his time showering, listening to the first inning on the radio while getting dressed. He was a reserve, a clutch pinch hitter. He had thrown some batting practice. He knew his number wouldn’t be called anytime soon.
Like Koufax, Amalfitano was signed as a bonus baby, but their careers had gone in different directions. Koufax was invaluable. Amalfitano made himself invaluable. As he entered the dugout, Ron Santo was putting his bat back in the rack and looking for Glenn Beckert, who was hiding from him at the other end of the bench. Santo had gone to the plate mindful of Beckert’s assessment of Koufax’s stuff. We got him where we want him tonight. He’s not throwing that good.
Santo loved Dodger Stadium almost as much as Wrigley Field in Chicago. It was a new park, only in its fourth season, but already it had a sense of occasion. He had been preparing for this at-bat since getting on the team bus earlier in the afternoon. Getting ready for Koufax meant coaching muscle fibers to react in the absence of the usual stimuli. Others allowed you to see the labor in their work. Koufax only allowed you to see it when it was done: in the way his hat needed straightening after every pitch. It looked like he was tipping his cap after each delivery.
Like most of his colleagues, Santo wasn’t disconcerted by Koufax’s speed. On the contrary. He wasn’t one of those guys who made you toss and turn at night. Unlike Drysdale, he was dominating as opposed to intimidating. His control was expected and presumed. He was one of the few opposing pitchers who actually said hello on the field. Santo figured it was because “he knew he was going to get you out.”
I go to the plate and I’m looking fastball. And I see this first fastball. Whish. I take a look at it, I want to see the ball, you know, the velocity. And I haven’t moved my hands. The next pitch, whish. Fastball. And I haven’t moved my hands. I haven’t made a move to swing. Now I haven’t seen the curveball yet. And you’re oh and two and you feel like you’re completely naked because you got no chance. What does he do? Whish. Fastball.
He walked back to the dugout thinking, I must not have seen the ball or I’d have swung at least at one of them. In fact, none of the pitches were called strikes and he had swung, popping out to
Torborg, who silently thanked Koufax for all those practice fungoes as he settled under the towering foul ball.
Santo’s confusion wasn’t unusual. Koufax had that effect on a lot of hitters: scrambling sense, reflex, and memory. Ernie Banks, the next batter, had faced Koufax every year since 1955. In his opinion, Koufax was not only the best pitcher in baseball but the smartest. Banks figured he must have graduated from Harvard or Yale with a degree in economics. Koufax could outthink you with just a fastball and a curve. He struck out on a forkball.
“Five,” Zev Yaroslavsky said.
Byron Browne walked to the plate for his first major league at-bat. He was twenty-two years old. Most of the summer he’d spent in Class A ball in Wenatchee, Washington, a prospect with minimal prospects. He’d been with the Triple A club for all of a week when he was called up. The night before, in Indianapolis, he hit two home runs off a long, tall pitcher named Dave DeBusschere, who also played a little basketball. Twenty-four hours later, he was facing Koufax, “a little-assed rookie trying to pick my jaw up off the floor.”
As he stepped into the batter’s box, Browne considered the light. It was hazy and dim, minor league light. Maybe it was from those fires he had seen from the sky. Billy Williams had mentioned something at the team hotel about there being some riots. Browne didn’t know any of the details. That 22,000 people had rioted in the streets less than three weeks earlier. That 1,032 people had been injured and three times that many arrested. That the National Guard had been called in. That thirty-four people had died with the rallying cry on their lips: “Burn, baby, burn.” That on the evening of August 14, the last time Koufax won a game, the scoreboard at Dodger Stadium posted bulletins listing the freeway exits that were closed due to rioting. He was a ballplayer. And when you’re a ballplayer facing Koufax in your first major league at-bat, you’re not thinking about anything except the scouting report that Williams had given him: “Lay off the fastball high, try to work him in the count, look for the slow curve.”
Everybody knew what to look for. Gene Mauch, the Phillies’ manager, would stand on the dugout steps and whistle every time Koufax threw a curve, not so much because he thought it would help his hitter—he knew it wouldn’t—but in hopes of distracting him. One time, Koufax stepped off the mound and growled, “Get a bat.”
Lots of people could call Koufax’s pitches in the stretch. Banks watched the position of his elbows. Willie Mays watched the thumb on his glove. Some players wouldn’t share such information even with teammates for fear of retribution. Joey A. was not that way. “When he opens his glove like an umbrella, he’s throwing the curve,” he told his teammates. “When he holds it tight, he’s throwing a fastball.”
Amalfitano figured it was a function of the size of his fingers; he had to open the glove wider to get a grip on the curve. Roseboro said as much: “As they say in the ghetto, ‘Shit, he’s got great big fucking hands,’ which is what you need to throw that curveball.”
It was a curve unlike any Torborg had ever seen. By season’s end, he was platooning with Roseboro. Even when he was in the starting lineup, he always offered to warm up the pitchers. He figured Rosie had earned the right not to do it. Catching Koufax in the pregame silence of an empty stadium, Torborg would listen for the sound of the seams biting the air. Thk, thk, thk. The ball spun so fast and broke so sharply that he had to learn a whole new way to catch it, sliding up toward the batter and reaching immodestly under his legs to grab the ball before it dropped out of the strike zone. Torborg thought, If the mound were any higher, the darned thing would go on back to him.
Lots of people questioned his hearing, even Roseboro. But not Browne. After listening to a curve for strike one, he wondered why Williams had told him to look for it. You keep looking and it’s still not there. The second pitch was a fastball aimed at his belt. By the time he swung at it, the ball was at his armpit. Strike two. Now he understood. When he gets your eyes up to that level, he comes back with the curve.
And that’s just what Koufax did. But this one didn’t paralyze, embarrass, or deceive. It hung like a full moon on a cloudless night over the outside corner of the plate. Browne went out and got it, driving it toward Willie Davis, who was playing shallow in center field. Like a Punch and Judy hitter, Browne thought indignantly. He didn’t know that Davis played everyone shallow.
It was the first hard-hit ball of the evening. Wow, he thought. I got a hit off Sandy Koufax! The roar of the crowd told him otherwise. He figured Davis must have made a great catch. Torborg saw nothing exceptional in the play. Neither did the official scorer. He marked his scorecard L 8, baseball’s notation for a line drive to center field. No exclamation point was deemed necessary.
Chapter 7
THE GREENHORN
TOMMY LASORDA STOOD ON THE MOUND of Field One at Dodgertown, the same artfully crafted perch of dirt and sand from which Sandy Koufax launched his first pitch as a pro in the spring of 1955. Aside from being left-handed and lifelong Dodgers, the two have little in common. Lasorda embraces celebrity, Koufax eschews it. Lasorda is voluble and Italian. Koufax is reserved and Jewish.
As manager of the Dodgers, Lasorda filled his office with stars and their trappings. As manager emeritus, in an era of corporate ownership, Lasorda was adjusting to a reduced role with the Dodgers, serving as a goodwill ambassador without portfolio. In the spring of 1999, he was a manager without anything to manage, an executive without an office. He was not in a good mood. He did not want to talk about Sandy Koufax.
“What happened?” he grumbled. “What happened with what? He took my spot. What do I have to do? I won twenty games the year before.”
It was the spring of 1955, and Lasorda, a career minor-leaguer, was hoping to go north with the team. Koufax was a nineteen-year-old bonus baby who threw the ball like a streak of lightning but didn’t know where to go after batting practice. Because of the bonus rule under which Koufax was signed, the Dodgers had to keep him on the major league roster. Because of Koufax, Lasorda had to go back to Montreal. Or take the job driving a beer truck that general manager Buzzie Bavasi thoughtfully arranged as an alternative. Nearly fifty years later, Lasorda was still feeling grumpy about it.
Cajoled by Tommy Hawkins, Dodger vice president for communications, and having nothing better to do than throw batting practice to the son of a former player, Lasorda slowly warmed to the tale of their intertwined fate. He likes to cast himself as a zelig in the Koufax saga. He was there when Koufax tried out at Ebbets Field, when Koufax played winter ball in Puerto Rico, when Koufax needed someone to throw to the night before his second no-hitter, when Koufax needed tickets before the seventh game of the 1965 World Series. Once he got going on the subject, Lasorda didn’t stop, failing to notice that one of the people to whom he was speaking had doubled over in acute pain with stomach cramps.
“One day, the general manager calls me into the office,” Lasorda said. “I said, ‘What, one of my relatives die or something?’ He says, ‘Nope, I’m sending you down to Triple A.’ Had to keep Koufax on the roster. He said, ‘The rules of baseball say if a player receives over a four-thousand-dollar limit, he must stay on the roster two years.’
“He says, ‘Who would you send down?’
“I said, without blinking an eye, ‘Koufax—he can’t hit the side of a barn at sixty feet.’”
Lasorda paused before delivering his gleefully polished punch line: “It took one of the greatest left-handers in history to get me off the Brooklyn team.”
The year, 1955, would prove seminal for both the Dodgers and the country. Graham Greene published The Quiet American, his prescient novel about a faraway place called Vietnam. A black woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The development of the oral polio vaccine was announced. The Kramdens of Bensonhurst got a half-hour network TV slot. President Dwight D. Eisenhower held the first televised presidential news conference, bringing the presidency into American living rooms. Everyone liked Ike. And any
one who didn’t could turn the channel with the newest electronic gadget, a remote control TV clicker.
The Dodgers were desperate to change their luck. Vanquished by Joe DiMaggio’s Yankees in 1941, 1947, and 1949; slain by Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world” in 1951; humbled by the Yankees again in 1952 and 1953, the Boys of Summer were growing old waiting till next year. Walter Alston was back for his second year as manager, charged with the responsibility of turning the perennial “Bums” into champions. It was a veteran club, not all of whom were enamored of their manager, a conservative midwesterner with prodigious strength and considerable inexperience. Not all of them saw the merits of allocating a roster spot to a pitcher who had pitched exactly four college games. As Duke Snider put it, “We had lost so many pennants by one game, the world series by one game, that it was tough to take a chance on someone going out there and throwing strikes unless they’ve proven that they can.”
Ownership, however, regarded the signing of a Jewish ballplayer the way others regarded the coming of the Messiah. The Dodgers were so desperate for a Jewish presence, given the demographics of Brooklyn, that Bavasi had hired Lee Scott as traveling secretary under the mistaken impression that he was one of the Chosen People. Bavasi was disappointed when Scott showed up one Ash Wednesday with traces of his faith on his brow. Jewish ballplayers were even more scarce than lefties. Harry Eisenstat, Sid Gordon, and Cal Abrams were all gone: traded, retired, flamed out. Koufax was a marketing godsend. “Why Flock Signed Sandy Koufax!” trumpeted the Brooklyn Eagle. “Jewish Southpaw from Boro a Natural for Ebbets Field.”