Sandy Koufax

by Jane Leavy

  On June 9, 1955, the Times reported: “The Dodgers released Tom Lasorda outright to their Montreal International League affiliate in order to create room on the roster for Sandy Koufax. Both are southpaw pitchers.” Which is a little like saying Abraham Lincoln and James Polk were both president. “Sandy could throw better right-handed than Lasorda could throw left-handed,” Black said.

  Koufax made his major league debut on June 24, in the fifth inning of a game in Milwaukee with the Dodgers trailing 7–1. Johnny Logan waited at home plate, watching him walk across the grass “with his jacket over his shoulder, like a high school kid, Sandy Koufax, mop-up man.”

  The crowd noise, which seemed benign in the bullpen, reached up to greet him. Through the intimidating crescendo he heard the public address announcer mispronounce his name—“Koo-fax,”—as Logan stepped to the plate. In Koufax’s recollection, Logan hit a blooper off the end of the bat. “A blooper?” Logan said. “You got to be kidding. It was a line drive over Gil Hodges’s head. Hit the white line in right field for a double. A double. Chrissakes, I remember that just like today is—what day is it? You tell Sandy Koufax it was a double.”

  It was a bloop single. The next hitter was slugger Eddie Mathews, who surprised Koufax by bunting back to the mound. Koufax calmly threw the ball into center field. The third hitter was Hank Aaron, the one batter for whom he later confessed he never had a plan. He walked on four pitches. Bobby Thomson—that Bobby Thomson, slayer of Dodger dreams—followed Aaron to the plate. The count went to 3 and 2 before Thomson swung and missed, thus becoming the first man ever struck out by Sandy Koufax. “Hey, I’m famous,” the dour Scotsman said decades later.

  Koufax’s first major league start came two weeks later against Pittsburgh. He walked eight batters in the 4 and 2?3 innings he pitched and didn’t get another start for seven weeks. “Oh, no,” coach Jake Pitler moaned when Alston announced Koufax would face the Reds on August 27.

  Birdie Tebbetts, the Reds manager, who had ignored Ed Jucker’s plea to sign Koufax out of college, got a scouting report from Joe Black, who had been acquired from the Dodgers in June. “He throws hard,” Black said.

  It was a glorious Saturday afternoon. Koufax struck out fourteen, most that season in the National League, and surrendered only two hits: a first-inning single to Ted Kluszewski and a ninth-inning double to Sam Mele. Their paths wouldn’t cross again until a decade later when Mele was managing the Minnesota Twins in the 1965 World Series. Mele was heading back to the visiting clubhouse after being shut out by Koufax 7–0. “He’s right in the doorway wrapped in a towel,” Mele recalled. “I said, ‘Nice game.’ He pointed a finger at me and said, ‘You hit a double off me.’”

  No wonder he remembered. It was his first major league victory, a complete-game shutout. Bob Rosen, one of just 7,204 paying customers at Ebbets Field, left the game convinced the Dodgers had finally found their Jewish star. Not that he hung on to his ticket stub. Who knew it would be worth real money to latter-day Koufax “completionists”?

  “Every pitch was whomp, whomp, whomp,” Black said. “I mean, they were coming back carrying the lumber. Next day, Birdie says, ‘That rookie made us look terrible. Where the hell they been keeping him?’”

  On the bench. He made only twelve appearances in 1955, pitching 41.2 innings, walking almost as many men (twenty-eight) as he struck out (thirty). His only other win in 1955 was another shutout. “He was totally inconsistent but brilliant,” Rosen said.

  He had energy to burn and time to kill. Jerry Goldstein, one of his old neighborhood pals, was working as a vendor at Ebbets Field that summer: Hey, ice cream, ice cream…Give yer tongue a sleigh ride. “One day, when I was done selling hot dogs and souvenirs, Sandy gave my brother Gary and me a ride home in his new Plymouth convertible and dropped us off at Coney Island Avenue and Avenue J, where we met our parents at the Joy-Fong Chinese Restaurant. It was a Sunday, because in Brooklyn, Sundays meant Chinese food with Mom and Dad.”

  They didn’t see each other again until 1993, when Goldstein was visiting cousins in North Carolina, who lived down the road from Koufax. “So I stopped by to see him—nobody was home—I left a note—and about two hours later, down the long, dirty road leading to the house, comes this pickup truck…. It could have been Clint Eastwood in The Bridges of Madison County. It was Sandy coming over to say hello.”

  He spent the 1955 All-Star break in Kingston, New York, visiting camp friends still working as waiters. “He never went onto the camp grounds and his visit was always kept secret,” Ken Bodenstein said. “He didn’t want people making a big deal. It was the first time I saw that private side of him. He stayed at a motel. Nobody knew Sandy was in town.

  “We would serve each meal, then drive the fifteen minutes to Kingston, and spend our free time playing pool, eating pizza, having a few beers and listening to Sandy’s stories about groupies following him everywhere, how they would follow him into the hotel and just grab him in the elevator.”

  That fall, he enrolled in Columbia University’s School of General Studies, which offered night classes in architecture. “Sandy spent more time in my dorm room in Hartley Hall talking baseball and sports than in a classroom,” said Bodenstein, then a Columbia College junior. “One day, a guy walks into my room, he’s a big Dodger fan, and he says, ‘That’s Sandy Koufax!’ And he just froze. Then it got to be a big deal. Finally, I said, ‘Hey, we got to cool it. I got to get through exams.’”

  Koufax had a fine view from the dugout in Yankee Stadium of Sandy Amoros’s catch in left field that finally made the Bums World Champions. Afterward, he drove to Columbia to attend class. No one in academia suspected he was a ballplayer. “I’m one of the pitchers although I don’t pitch too much yet,” he told the professor, who gave him permission to skip class in order to attend the team victory party.

  “When Sandy received his first world series check, he came up to Morningside Heights and took me out to the New Asia—the ‘Nausea,’ we called it,” Bodenstein said. “We celebrated over Chinese food.”

  Throughout his career, Koufax was seen as an ally by minorities—teammates and opponents, American and National Leaguers. Word got around, as it will, traveling from clubhouse to clubhouse: Koufax was consistent. He treated everyone the same. Cheesy Kawano, the clubhouse man’s wife, who was at the ballpark a lot helping her husband with the players’ laundry, says Koufax was the only member of the team who knew her name and addressed her by it. “If he was in a restaurant, he would never shy away from sitting with the colored fellas,” Black said. “If he saw me sitting over there, he’ll come sit down and say, ‘How ya doin’?’”

  This sentiment wasn’t confined to his teammates. Earl Battey, who would face him as one of Mele’s Twins in the 1965 series, paid him the ultimate compliment: “I accused him of being black. I told him he was too cool to be white.”

  Partly this was the legacy of a grandfather with a social conscience, partly the democratizing influence of competing under the boards in Brooklyn. But, perhaps there was something else at play. Perhaps, Dave Wallace says, Koufax identified with the black players as much as they identified with him. Fred Wilpon agrees. “Sandy had a special feeling toward the downtrodden and the oppressed, a special feeling for the black players and their plight,” Wilpon said. “And I think maybe part of it was sort of a substitution for his own minority standing.”

  Late at night in the Dodger locker room while icing aching arms and legs, Koufax would screen Maury Wills’s mail. “Funny mail,” Wills called it. “I could tell when I had some hate mail. You could just look at the envelope and tell. I didn’t want to read it anymore when I got to a certain point. And when he was reading it we’d have a lot of fun with it. He was—‘Oh, you got to read this one.’” On occasion, Wills had the opportunity to reciprocate.

  Koufax never forgot Joe Black’s kindness. One day in the summer of 1965, the Dodgers were in New York to play the Mets. Black was out of baseball and working as a vice president f
or the Greyhound Corporation. “I’m just walking on Fifth Avenue, y’know, and all of a sudden two hands go over my eyes,” he said. “I’m, like, ‘What the?’ Someone says, ‘Guess who?’

  “I turned around and it was Sandy Koufax. I said, ‘Where did you come from?’ He was across the street, walking in the opposite direction. He ran all the way to come my way. That’s when he was a star. I was a hacker, a one-year wonder. Here’s a man who says, ‘You’re my friend then, you’re my friend now.’ The same old Sandy Koufax.”

  Chapter 8

  THE THIRD INNING

  THE DODGERS WERE in the process of going three up and three down in the bottom half of the second inning when Dave Smith’s father wandered past his son’s bedroom in Escondido and noticed the tape recorder wasn’t running. Dave wouldn’t be happy about missing the first two innings of a Koufax game. Koufax was Dave’s favorite player on his favorite team. The first game he ever saw, on July 18, 1958, he chose because Koufax was starting. Not too many people organized their lives around Koufax’s appearances that season. (He was knocked out in the first inning after striking out two and walking four.) So, as Dave’s father switched on the machine, he muttered under his breath, “This is the best I can do, David.”

  The machine began to record just as Scully was making a commercial pitch for Chevrolet’s year-end Fall Cleanup Sale—Hundreds off the sticker price!—and just as Bill Buhler was turning off his movie camera. Buhler had only a hundred feet of film—enough for three minutes of live action—so he decided to conserve his resources for the top of the Cubs’ order.

  “Here’s Chris Krug, coming up for Chicago,” Jerry Doggett said, taking over the play-by-play. Krug was twenty-five, a right-handed hitter batting .219. Called up in May, he was starting against lefties by September. It was the first of what he expected would be many years in the major leagues. He was a California kid, out of Riverside. This was his first trip home as a major-leaguer. He had bought a bunch of tickets from the front office for family and friends. Gary Adams, his best friend, was sitting behind first base with his mother, a real fan, and his mother-in-law, who had never been to a major league baseball game.

  Krug had heard about Koufax’s fastball. A radio ball, the old-timers called it. You can hear it but you can’t see it. As Casey Stengel, the Old Professor, once noted, “Umpires often can’t see where Koufax pitches go, so they have to judge from the sound of them hitting the catcher’s glove. He’s very tough on umps who are hard of hearing.”

  Krug wanted to see for himself. He swung and missed at the first pitch and took another for a called strike two, turning to look at Torborg in disbelief. They knew each other some from the minors. “What the hell?” Krug said. “What was that?”

  “Ball’s going up,” Torborg replied.

  Some old catchers stuffed their mitts with falsies, protecting delicate digits with the padding women used to enhance their bust. Torborg preferred athletic tape—easier to augment. Koufax wasn’t hard to catch. Not like Drysdale, who threw a heavy, sinking ball, not to mention the occasional spitter. Koufax threw a four-seam fastball, his fingers pulling back on the stitching to create backspin and lift. Drysdale threw a two-seamer, creating topspin and bite. Drysdale was a “hard hard.” Koufax was an “easy hard.” No matter how hard he threw, he was light. Torborg thought: He throws the ball hard so easy.

  Ed Bailey, the Cubs’ veteran catcher, watched from the bullpen, trying to gauge Koufax’s stuff from Krug’s response to it. After Krug lined out to center, he returned to the bench feeling pretty good about himself. At least he made contact. His buddy, Gary Adams, was thinking along with him: At least you hit a good fly ball. From the bullpen, Bailey had a more jaundiced view. Cocky kid, he thought. Sandy ate ’im alive.

  Don Kessinger, the young Cubs shortstop, approached the plate not so much with trepidation as curiosity. Kessinger had been reading the papers like everyone else, stories about “this old left-hander whose elbow hurt so bad he might not be able to pitch much more.” But he didn’t give himself much of a chance to form an opinion, flying out on an 0-and-2 pitch.

  “That’s eight,” Yaroslavsky said.

  “All right, two down,” Doggett announced. “Bob Hendley coming up.”

  Hendley took a few languid practice swings while Doggett updated the pennant race. The Giants had won. Juan Marichal was the victor, getting his twenty-first win and his tenth shutout. The Mets and Reds were all tied up in the seventh. With just twenty-one games left in the regular season, the Dodgers had to win to keep pace in the National League pennant race. “The Dodgers see the Cubs again next week in Chicago,” Doggett pointed out, hopefully.

  Hendley was focused not on the future, not even on his prospective at-bat, but on the mound, a handcrafted pile of dirt and clay lovingly molded into a sublime perch by Dodger groundskeepers. It was 50 percent clay, 30 percent sand, and 20 percent silt—a pitcher’s butte. Major league rules mandated a fifteen-inch height limit. Everyone said the mound at Dodger Stadium was sixteen inches at least, probably higher. It gave even the least prepossessing pitcher an aura of indomitability and made the most invincible batter a supplicant. Other mounds were higher still. But none had the sheer drop-off, pitching rubber to ground level, that distinguished Dodger Stadium. With the length of Koufax’s fingers, arms, and stride factored into the equation, he was no more than fifty-four or fifty-five feet away from the plate when he released the ball. On top of you. From the batter’s box, Koufax looked like an elegant crane swooping down on its prey from the lip of the Grand Canyon.

  “Bob bats right, throws left,” Doggett said. “In just sixteen games, Hendley was two and two. He had a lot of trouble this year and had to go out to Salt Lake City and get straightened away. He worked just thirty-seven innings in the majors this year and had an earned run average of 8.29.”

  Granted, Hendley was no longer the pitcher he had once been. But he loved the mound at Dodger Stadium, the way the clay held your spikes and made a pitcher secure. It leveled the playing field, giving him a fleeting taste of the omnipotence Koufax always enjoyed. He savored the sensation of bearing down on the batter, the way Koufax was now bearing down on him. So even as he struck out, meekly and predictably, to end the half inning, he was looking forward to climbing back up the hill.

  Chapter 9

  TO BE YOUNG AND WILD

  IN THE HALL OUTSIDE THE GYM at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, there is a display case heralding the names of the seventeen boys who became major leaguers—among them the Aspromonte brothers, Ken and Bob, Al Ferrara, Larry Yellen, John Franco, and Sandy Koufax. His pictures are long gone from the school library, empty frames in yellowing yearbooks. “Sandy’s glove was here, too,” longtime baseball coach Joe Gambuzza said. “But someone broke the showcase and took it.”

  The school, now called “Hell High,” was unable to field a team for the 2002 season. Not enough interest. Not enough passing grades. The last generation of players trained and competed on Ben Sherman Field, named for the team doctor who, according to legend, set Koufax’s broken finger, thereby enabling him to fulfill his unknown destiny. Players dress in a dank, cinder-block bunker adjacent to the field where Gambuzza sat one spring afternoon, before he retired in 2001, in a three-legged chair dispensing the same paradoxical advice to two young pitchers given to Koufax fifty years ago. Don’t throw so damn hard. Let ’em hit the ball.

  One of the pitchers, Chris Dowd, had caddied for Koufax at a golf tournament in Westchester County. He cherished the advice Koufax gave him: “When you make it, be grateful.”

  Modern myth-making is by definition retrospective; the accretion of detail produces a portrait so outsized it seems petty to question the particulars. Take Koufax’s broken finger. If Dr. Benjamin Sherman hadn’t been there, hadn’t been so dedicated, hadn’t been so competent, then Koufax wouldn’t have healed and prospered. The only problem with this bit of mythology is that it was another kid who broke his finger. Koufax only dislocated his. “A not
hing,” the doctor said. So much so that when doctor and patient met years later and Koufax said, “Remember me?” Sherman had to admit, “To tell you the truth, I didn’t.”

  The essential Koufax myth is this: A fire-balling young lefty, a bonus baby whose own teammates wouldn’t get in the batting cage against him, suddenly became a pitcher of such exquisite control that catcher John Roseboro said, “He wasn’t throwing on the outside corner of the plate but on the outside of the outside.” His wildness is an indispensable part of his myth. After all, if he hadn’t been so wild, so unpredictable, so thoroughly unharnessed, then his reversal of form and fortune wouldn’t have been so miraculous. It’s a better story this way.

  “The common understanding of how he emerged from someone allegedly who couldn’t throw the ball near home plate to somebody who became the greatest pitcher in the history of the game for six years in a row is a misconception,” says Fred Wilpon. “I actually think that six-year period where manager Alston played him one day and pitched him four weeks later was the root of his inconsistency. And had he been brought along either through the minor leagues or in the major leagues in a consistent way and handled better, in my opinion, he would have emerged as a superstar far earlier.

  “There was no rationale from the beginning. He had this extraordinary talent. And it wasn’t all of a sudden he discovered how to throw a curveball. He knew how to throw a curveball before. He had two devastating pitches. He suffered through that period and I thought he was poorly handled. I think he would have been pitching very successfully at an earlier age. I don’t know why they didn’t use him better. Why he didn’t walk away was because he was a fierce competitor. He knew that given the opportunity, he could be successful.”

  Tall tales are an essential part of baseball’s charm and they grow stilts in the retelling. Word was he had great stuff but couldn’t keep it in the batting cage. Word was Joe Becker, the pitching coach, took him behind the barracks at Dodgertown to throw so he wouldn’t embarrass himself or hurt anyone else. Word was he struck out seven batters in a row in a winter league game, walked the next ten, and then hit a lady in the stands. “Right here,” Orlando Cepeda said, pointing to his forehead.