Sandy Koufax

by Jane Leavy

  Walter O’Malley told reporter Dave Anderson: “We hope he’ll be as great as Hank Greenberg or Sid Gordon. But we don’t want to be accused of discriminating against the Irish.”

  Long after O’Malley moved the Dodgers out of Brooklyn, he confided to Roger Kahn, author of the seminal history of the franchise, The Boys of Summer, “I’m in Brooklyn. I’d have given my right arm for a Jewish star—I’m talking about a big Jewish star. Maybe I’d still be in Brooklyn. I come out here and I can fill the ballpark with nine fucking Chinamen and what do I get? Koufax.”

  Despite the marketing potential of the young lefty’s faith, he was an unknown quantity to baseball, and baseball was an unknown quantity to him. A preseason story in the Eagle boasted: “Dodger Roster Lists Four Super Rookies.” Koufax wasn’t one of them. A spring training story in the New York Times referred to him as “the bonus right-hander.”

  He reported a week early, joining Joe Black and Roy Campanella in Miami, where they were working out on their own. “We got a young bonus kid, Sandy Koo-something, wants to join us,” Campy told Black after hearing from Bavasi.

  “Okay, we’ll see,” Black replied.

  In 1955, Miami was still very much a segregated city. Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision declaring an end to the era of separate but equal, was less than a year old. The black players stayed at the Lord Calvert: the place to be among the black elite. “If you were at the Lord Calvert, you were down,” Black said before his death in May 2002. “That’s where Dorothy Dandridge stayed, and Nat King Cole.”

  Irving Rudd, the Dodgers’ director of promotions, got Koufax a room at a whites-only hotel—and some ink in the local papers. Rudd always introduced himself as “I. Rudd, press agent.” Not for him the grubby moniker “p.r.” man. He was a master in the performance art of the publicity stunt. He put Koufax in the lobby of the hotel with Jimmy Durante and called in the photographers. Fireballing young lefty teaches Durante how to pitch! That was the angle. “Oh, he was excited,” Rudd recalled shortly before his death. “After all, where does a kid from Brooklyn get to meet a guy like Durante? But it wasn’t ha-cha-cha-cha.”

  Who knew that ten years later Durante would be singing Koufax’s praises: “Sandy, dandy, Sandy!”

  The week in Miami was formative, forging relationships and precedents that would last his entire career. He visited his teammates at the Lord Calvert and, in Black’s recollection, admired the view: “He was saying, ‘Man, look at that girl around the swimming pool. This isn’t bad.’ Sandy was right at home.”

  He also received his first award as a major leaguer—a key to the City of Miami Beach. The mayor’s aide had to scurry to find another key for the anonymous rookie the big leaguers had in tow. “They took us all there in a little car caravan,” Black said. “We went out on the steps and they gave us keys to the city. Then boom, as soon as we got our keys, back over to the Lord Calvert. They put us back in the cars and we didn’t see each other again until we got to the ballpark, yeah.”

  At the ballpark, Campy was in charge. There were no weight machines, no stretching regimens, no facilities to speak of. “Campy says, ‘Okay, we’re going to run,’” Black remembered. “Sandy’s running and Sandy be saying, ‘What the hell, is this a track meet?’ I said, ‘Nah, the theory is if your legs are strong, your arm’s strong.’ We’re running, see, and I’d talk to him, joking, ‘I thought you were a baseball player.’ He said, ‘I’m a basketball player.’ I said, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘Yeah, baseball is just a game to me.’”

  He liked baseball fine, he liked pitching even better, but he thought it was presumptuous to call himself a ballplayer. If the Dodgers were willing to take a chance on him, why not? He could always use the bonus money to go back to college.

  On March 1, 1955, forty-two players, including twenty-one pitchers, reported to Dodgertown for the official opening of spring training. There were three boys from Bensonhurst: Sandy Koufax, Joe Pignatano, and Mike Napoli. Koufax was the only bonus baby and the only Jew. Karl Spooner was the pitching phenom in camp, having pitched two shutouts with twenty-seven strikeouts at the end of 1954. Spooner had a great arm and liked to show it off. On occasion, he took the Brooklyn boys fishing with him—you can see them in an old snapshot from Napoli’s scrapbook in their plaid shirts with their feet dangling from a ragged pier. Spooner hurled the catch back into the Indian River with cherry bombs stuck in their craws. Laughed like hell when the damn things blew up.

  Dodgertown is still baseball’s most famous spring address, but it bears little resemblance to the abandoned naval air station Branch Rickey leased from the government in 1949. There is nothing in the denatured architecture or the landscape to connect the place now advertised as “The Conference Center at Dodgertown” to its past except the quaint use of military idiom. Being caught off base in 1955 was a violation of curfew as well as a base-running error.

  There were no eagle-eyed autograph hunters or kids thrusting squares of toilet paper in Duke Snider’s face demanding: “Sign.” There was no gift shop in which to purchase a uniformed Dodger troll for $9, an authentic Ebbets Field Beer Stein for $125, or a Jackie Robinson Limited Edition Bear (55/1,000) for $480. There was no Sandy Koufax Room either, in which chapel services are held every Sunday morning. The military infrastructure long ago gave way to “villas”—generic motel-style accommodations—with addresses like 191 Sandy Koufax Way. Today’s Dodgers rent lavish villas by the seaside. A sculptured alligator wallowing in Bermuda grass is the only reminder of the bog and tangle this was when Koufax arrived for his first spring training.

  In 1955, Dodgertown was American primitive: The fragrance of orange blossoms mingled with the smell of old wool blankets left behind by the military. Orange juice was fresh-squeezed and pitching mounds were handmade. Baseball diamonds stretched as far as the horizon or at least as far as Eddie Rickenbacker’s Eastern Airlines landing strip, formerly a night flight training base. The Dodger plane flitted in and out, bringing in hard young bodies by the hundreds. Everybody wanted to be a major-leaguer. There were seven hundred players in camp, so many they had to be assigned color-coded numbers. There were Red Dodgers, Tan Dodgers, Yellow and Purple Dodgers. If you were lucky, you didn’t get assigned to Field Seven, farthest away from their minimal accommodations.

  There were no televisions, no radios, no telephones. They dined off metal trays left behind by the Navy and lived in the sailors’ wooden barracks. Koufax was as raw as the exposed two-by-four-inch studs in the room he shared with Charlie Templeton. The tar paper walls leaked. The rooms stayed hot when it was hot and cold when it was cold. Electric heaters and blankets were brought in; fuses blew. Guys fought over bath mats. “Amenities?” Snider said. “If we were lucky, they’d feed the spiders so they wouldn’t be hungry at night and crawl all over us.”

  Reporters and athletes lived side by side. Sportswriters brought their families along to enjoy the weather and the pool—an inducement to cover the team. Jack Lang and his family lived across the hall from the Campanellas. They took turns baby-sitting each other’s children during dinner. Poker and booze were added incentives.

  The base was dry for players. The closest watering hole was a dive named Lennie’s (or Lenny’s, depending on which sign you believe), walking distance through swamp and bog, out there beyond the batting cages. It wasn’t anywhere you wanted to get lost. There were water moccasins in residence. “Sam Jethroe went in there one night trying to get the ball,” said Tim Thompson. “He came out in a hurry—without the ball.”

  The Bucket of Blood was a popular spot of the era, as was the Patio. Carol Decker worked the bar there. “They didn’t have cars,” she said. “They’d walk in and say, ‘Set up seventeen beers’ and we said, ‘Yup.’ The rookies had to be back before curfew. If they couldn’t get back, we’d take ’em back. I had a big old van and they’d lie down in back and I’d pretend I was lost. A lot of times we took ’em out by the fence by the ballpark and they’d jump the fenc
e.”

  Sometimes they got caught. A loose board in the bridge spanning the canal betrayed them: thump, thump, thump. “Those boys weren’t the best boys,” Decker said. “They were all married. Needless to say, they were all looking for a good time. Sometime down the road, the city fathers and the Dodgers got together on it. The fathers of the young girls weren’t happy. The boyfriends weren’t happy. My God, it was a feather in your cap if you had a Dodger.”

  As Johnny Podres, the veteran bon vivant, put it, “Hell, I pitched single.”

  Field Number One, a pristine green diamond, lies just outside the press room and cocktail lounge then off-limits to players. It was here that Koufax made his debut in a Brooklyn Dodger uniform. Lang, who covered the team for the Long Island Press, witnessed the event: “The first pitch he ever threw went over the screen and landed on top of the flat roof of the press room, where Harold Burr of the Eagle was sitting in an easy chair. It landed with a thud and woke him up.”

  This inauspicious beginning provided the impetus and subtext for the enduring Koufax mythology: the wild young lefty who became the greatest control power pitcher of modern times. “Nobody was ever greener,” he has said of himself. He didn’t know the drill or the drills. He thought having “good wheels” meant having a good head on your shoulders. It was all new to him, not just the language or the etiquette, but the punishing dailiness of throwing a ball. “The first spring I was so scared,” he said. “I had never in my life thrown a baseball every day. I was so sore I couldn’t throw. It took five or six years to get my body used to the fact of pitching.”

  When Red Smith, the preeminent sports columnist of the day, writing for the New York Herald Tribune, arrived at Dodgertown on March 5 looking for an angle, Joe Becker, the anonymous new pitching coach, was his subject. Koufax was a minor character in Smith’s column, “a baby-pitcher” with Joe Black by his side in the string area behind Field One. In Dodger lore, this is sacred ground, where generations of phenoms and has-beens learned the art of control by throwing through a matrix of strings erected over adjoining plates. In the next day’s Tribune, Smith noted the youngster’s nervousness.

  One wild pitch sailed over the catcher’s head and smacked high against the backstop. “Oh, nuts,” the kid said.

  “That’s all right,” Becker said. “Just take it easy.”

  “Everybody throws ’em there,” Black said. “I know a fellow used to throw ’em over the backstop.”

  “Sure,” Becker said. “His name was Feller, wasn’t it?”

  That spring, Black was frequently by Koufax’s side. Black was twenty-eight his rookie season. He remembered what it was like to stand outside the locker room trying to summon enough courage to cross the threshold into the major leagues. “Suppose I don’t see Campy, what am I going to do? What do I say to these guys? I didn’t even know their names. I called them by their numbers. ‘Hey! Number 1.’”

  He remembered his gratitude when Preacher Roe came over and introduced himself, the same Preacher Roe who was traded to make room on the roster for nineteen-year-old Koufax three years later. So when Black discovered Koufax wandering around the infield wondering what to do next, he said, “Just follow me.”

  Growing up, Black’s baseball hero was Hank Greenberg. He copied the man’s batting stance and memorized his stats, preserving them carefully in a scrapbook. He rooted for Hammerin’ Hank to break Babe Ruth’s home-run record in 1938 the way the Jews of Brooklyn rooted for Jackie Robinson when he broke the color barrier in 1947.

  In high school, scouts started coming around. “You’re good but you’re colored,” they told him. “Colored guys don’t play baseball.” He ran home and tore up all his scrapbooks. “There was pictures of Tony Lazzeri, Frankie Crosetti, Charlie Gerhringer. All white. I tore ’em all up except Greenberg.”

  Robinson’s first season in the majors was Greenberg’s last. They met on the field one day in Pittsburgh. “He got a hit and stood beside me at first base with his chin up, like a prince,” Greenberg said later. “I had a feeling for him because of the way I had been treated. I remember saying to him, ‘Don’t let them get you down. You’re doing fine. Keep it up.’”

  A headline in the next day’s New York Times returned the compliment: “Hank Greenberg a Hero to Dodgers’ Negro Star.”

  When Koufax arrived in segregated Florida in 1955, ten years after the liberation of the concentration camps in Germany, blacks and Jews could still identify with each other as persecuted minorities. Anti-Semitism was subtle but entrenched. “Tucked away in private clubs, locker rooms, bars,” the author Irving Howe wrote. Koufax didn’t trumpet his background, nor did he hide it. “It wasn’t as though Sandy had a Star of David on his sleeve,” said Tom Villante, who traveled with the team as broadcast coordinator. “Some people thought he was French.”

  Drysdale, who joined the team in 1956, called him Koo-foo—the legacy of Joe Garagiola’s mispronunciation—and the name stuck.

  Koufax defused potential embarrassments with humor. Like the time there was a pig roast in Duke Snider’s backyard and his wife worried about what Koufax would eat. “I’ll have some of that turkey,” he reassured her.

  Carl Erskine, a stalwart of the pitching staff, remembers one particularly sweaty bus ride through Miami. “We’d played a night game. We were on the way back to the hotel on a bus. It was just a little city bus; it had been chartered. And it’s hot. No air-conditioning. And Miami’s got all these train tracks going all through there. So we got stopped by a train. And I mean it was hot. And ballplayers are edgy anyway. And they were moaning and mumbling and Billy Herman was one of our coaches, who was a Hall of Famer. And after a while, he yells out, real loud, ‘You can give this damn town back to the Jews.’ And Sandy’s sitting right across the aisle, you know? And all of us are, ‘Oh, Billy.’ So after a few minutes of silence, Sandy, in a real soft voice, says, ‘Now, Billy, you know we’ve already got it.’”

  That there would be some anti-Semitism in baseball is hardly surprising. The national pastime was no bastion of enlightenment. Being a bonus baby was bad enough. Being a Jewish bonus baby was a liability. There was an unspoken calculus: Moneyed and Jewish went together like left-handed and wild. With jobs at stake and world series earnings more than just pocket change, judgments could be fierce and unforgiving. What Hank Greenberg did for Jackie Robinson, Robinson, Black, Campanella, and Newcombe did for Koufax, taking him under their sheltering wing. It was the Dodger way: Hadn’t Pee Wee Reese walked across the infield in Cincinnati in 1947 to put his arm around Robinson—an act of moral courage memorialized in literature, infused in the history of the franchise, and remembered as a landmark in the American struggle for racial equality?

  “We had our reasons, our one reason—it was because he was a Jew,” Newcombe said. “Some of the players did not like him because he was a Jew. They vilified him because he was a bonus baby and had to stay on the roster. It wasn’t his fault. He wanted to go to the minors. I couldn’t understand the narrow-mindedness of these players when they would come to us and talk about Sandy as ‘this kike’ and ‘this Jew bastard’ or ‘Jew sonofabitch that’s gonna take my job.’ And: ‘I’ve got to go to the minor leagues because he’s on the ball club and he can’t throw the ball in the batting cage but he’s gonna take somebody’s job.’ And saying it in front of us about Sandy! They hated Jews as much as they hated blacks. I don’t know if Sandy ever knew that, but that’s why we took care of Sandy.

  “Players used to complain he threw the ball too hard. But the way they used to complain—‘The wild Jew sonofabitch, I’m not gonna hit against that’—and they’d use the f-word—‘that kike as wild as he is.’ And these were star Dodger players, some of them. You think of crackers as being from the South but a lot of those crackers they were from California and other places. That’s what made him such a strong man. He knew some of the players did not like him because he was not producing and he was also a Jew.” (He says Lasorda was not among them.)

>   The perception wasn’t confined to the Dodger locker room. It was the mind-set of the era. “Sandy Koufax, being a little Jewish boy, didn’t know anything about baseball,” Hank Aaron said, describing the prevailing attitude. “Everybody thought, Hey, he needs to be somewhere off in school, counting money or doing whatever they do.”

  Around the league “there was definitely some of that: the spoiled Jewish kid with a lot of money,” said Frank Torre. “You talk to some old-timers, I don’t care what they tell you today, they used to grumble like hell. Two things were happening. They had a good team. They felt it could have been better without him. Then there would have been somebody legitimate in his spot who was really going to help the team. Down deep most of them resented the fact that he had earned more money than them.”

  When, late in spring training, Koufax conveniently sprained his ankle, the joke around Dom Fristachi’s Brooklyn neighborhood was: “He tripped over his wallet.” A wallet big enough to buy a shiny new red convertible and treat Dom and his girl to dinner at a Chinese restaurant before the annual Dodger-Yankee exhibition game. Koufax sat in the stands with them, a spectator, just as he was when he kept Wilpon company during try-outs. On May 9, a hairline fracture in the previously sprained ankle was miraculously diagnosed, enabling the Dodgers to place him on the thirty-day disabled list.

  Lasorda got a temporary reprieve. Koufax kept his mouth shut. “You wouldn’t know he was there,” Bavasi said. “He wasn’t anything like Tommy Lasorda, who let everyone know he was there. But Tommy had to do it because he had no ability. I shouldn’t say that. He was oh and four in the major leagues.” In four appearances with the Dodgers, he had a 13.50 ERA. Despite the grumbling of more seasoned pitchers that he wasn’t one of them, Lasorda would always be able to say he was a member of the 1955 World Championship team—a claim validated years later when Peter O’Malley had a world series ring made for him from the old mold.