by Jane Leavy
They shared an apartment in Los Angeles. They played cards, saw some shows, drove back and forth to the stadium together. Neither of them was a carouser but the girls chased them plenty. “The girls were crazy about anybody in uniform,” Piggy said. “Sandy was one of those guys who wasn’t gonna get hooked. He wanted to do the asking. I never questioned him if he was seeing anyone. That was strictly personal.”
Koufax went to Erskine, a family man and paterfamilias of the pitching staff, for advice on how to meet women. “He used to talk to me kind of in a quiet way, say, ‘Uh, you’ve got a nice family and a nice wife. How do I find girls like that?’
“And I’d say, ‘Well, Sandy, what type of girl?’
“‘Well, a good home girl or homemaker—you know, a domestic type. But a girl with some life.’
“I said, ‘Well, you’re dating, aren’t you? A handsome kid like you, you’ve gotta be dating in L.A.’ He said, ‘I date.’
“I said, ‘Well, who do you date?’ ‘Oh, these young starlets, these beautiful girls that come out here who have stars in their eyes to meet movie stars.’
“And I said, ‘Well, where do you meet these girls?’ ‘Cocktail parties and the bar, you know.’
“I said, ‘Sandy, you go to synagogue, don’t you? How about the symphony and cultural things in L.A.? Why don’t you start spending more time in those places?’”
Over the next three years, Koufax was in and out of the starting rotation, up and down in the strike zone, on and off the disabled list. He told reporters he wasn’t sure whether he was a shlemiel or a shlemazel. “In Yiddish,” he explained, “a schlemiel is someone who spills soup on people. A schlemazel is someone who has soup spilled on him.” Either way it was messy. In July 1958, he had a record of 7 and 3 and four consecutive wins when he sprained his ankle in a collision at first base. He finished the year 11 and 11 and led the majors only in wild pitches.
There were intimations as well as lamentations. One June evening in 1959, he struck out sixteen Phillies, a record for a night game. Two months later, he broke that record in Los Angeles, against the Giants, tying Bob Feller’s major league record of eighteen strikeouts. There were 82,794 people in the reconfigured ballpark that night to see the most heated confrontation of the pennant race. Koufax struck out the side three times and allowed Willie McCovey the only home run he ever hit off him. Naysayers noted the Coliseum’s poor lighting.
The win reduced the Giants lead in the National League to one game. The Los Angeles Times pronounced it “one of the most momentous victories in the Dodgers’ glorious history.” Columnist Mal Florence wrote that the former bonus baby was a “bargain baby at any price.” Even so, Koufax was close to coming out of the game; a pinch hitter sent up to bat for him in the seventh inning was called back from the on-deck circle.
Though he struck out forty-one men in his last three appearances of the season, he remained an afterthought, a spot starter and reliever for the 1959 National League champions. The Dodgers traveled to Chicago to meet the “Go Go Sox,” where Koufax made his first world series appearance, pitching two perfect innings in relief in an 11–0 rout.
Alston gave him the start in game five—after determining that Larry Sherry was unavailable to pitch. The game was played at the Coliseum in front of more than 92,000 fans. Joe DiMaggio was in town but refused to attend on the grounds it was no place to see a ballgame. Koufax lost 1–0 when Nellie Fox scored on a double play. It is tempting to wonder how different the trajectory of his career might have been had the Dodgers elected to throw home. They won the series in six games without any further assistance from him. He was a world champion without portfolio.
The 1960 season began in sorrow and ended in disgust. On February 23, Ebbets Field was demolished. That morning one last ballgame, a charity event, took place at the old ballpark on Bedford Avenue. A jaunty iron wrecking ball painted with baseball stitching hovered over home plate, the message as subtle as the intent. To Robert Pinsky, the emerging poet, it said: “Not only are we going to screw you but we’re going to grin while we’re doing it.”
Koufax’s career had progressed hardly at all since the Dodgers left Brooklyn. He was despondent. His relationship with Alston was at best uneasy. Alston was solid and stolid, conservative by nature, a “company man” in Erskine’s opinion. Koufax was “a young hard thrower and a hardhead,” his friend, Dick Tracewski, later said.
“He doesn’t know what it means to pitch and win in the majors,” Bavasi was quoted as saying in the newspapers. “He’s got one of those silent tempers. He gets mad at himself and decides to overpower the hitter.”
In early May, Koufax confronted Bavasi in the tunnel behind the batting cage at the Coliseum. It was the classic player’s lament: Play me or trade me! Dodger pitcher Ed Palmquist overheard the conversation, as did Giants Sam Jones and Willie Mays. Mel Durslag reported what Mays told him in the next day’s Los Angeles Herald Examiner. “Trade him to us. He’s got a fastball you can’t see.”
A sanitized version of the conversation appeared in Koufax’s autobiography:
“Buzzie,” I said, “why don’t you trade me? I want to pitch, and I’m not going to get a chance here.”
“How can we pitch you,” Buzzie said, “when you can’t get anyone out?”
“How can I get anyone out when I’m sitting around in the dugout?”
Bavasi remembers the conversation differently. “Sandy stopped me one day and he said, ‘Buzzie, I think I’ll quit. I think I’ll go home.’ Now as I’m walking, I’m saying to myself if I beg him to stay, it’s not going to do him any good. If I agree with him and tell him that he should go, maybe he’ll have some of his mother in him and tell me, ‘You no-good sonofabitch, I’m better than you think I am.’
“So I said, ‘Sandy, when do you want to leave? I’ll get a ticket for you.’
“He said, ‘Grrrrr, I’ll let you know.’
“So I’ll be darned, three days later he went out and pitched a hell of a ball game, a one-hitter. So help me, that was the toughest decision I ever made in my life.”
A third version casts events in a different light. “I’m behind you,” Bavasi said. “Every spring I bet Walt you’ll end up with more wins than Don.” To which Koufax reportedly replied, “Either you’re a liar or a moron. He gets forty starts, I get fifteen.” And in the background high-pitched Willie Mays was chortling, “We’ll take him. We’ll take him.”
Bavasi swears he never contemplated trading Koufax, never doubted the pitcher he would become. “Everyone in our organization knew that he was gonna be one of a kind. But all of us were afraid that he would go out there and not do the job and get disgusted. I think Sandy thought we were all nuts. And he might have been right.”
By 1957, there were only twenty-one bonus babies left in the majors; Koufax was perhaps the most prominently disadvantaged. He became an object lesson to others. Jim Kaat’s father cited Koufax’s experience in turning down a $25,000 bonus deal with the Chicago White Sox. Kaat accepted a lowly offer from the Washington Senators instead. “That probably represented about six years’ salary for my dad,” Kaat said. “Washington offered me four thousand dollars and said, ‘You go to the rookie league.’ My dad had the foresight to see that the success and the money is on the other end, not up front.”
The bonus rule was replaced by the amateur draft in 1965. The animus toward bonus players remained as long as the system survived. When Joe Moeller received an $80,000 bonus from the Dodgers in 1962, he was excluded from team meetings and parties, voted the same share of postseason money as the batboys. He was one of the first major leaguers to have his own room on the road. “Because no one wanted to room with me,” he said.
By the end of 1960, Koufax was ready to quit. His belated passion had become an unrequited love. His record for the year was 8 and 13. He was a career losing pitcher. Maybe he should have stayed in school. There were other things in the world. He had a part ownership in an electronics business. He always
loved fixing things, carried around a suitcase he had rigged up with a reel-to-reel tape deck, a prototype boom box. “He had a year of college,” said teammate Ed Roebuck. “He wasn’t as hopeless as the rest of us. He was either going to become a real good pitcher or quit. He couldn’t cope with mediocrity. He wouldn’t stand for it.”
Wills, who was perhaps his closest friend on the team, said: “There’s no telling—he may have quit a lot of times and changed his mind before he got to the ballpark. Something was in his craw all the time. It ate at him, the way they treated him early. He had a resentment going. Part of his greatness might have come from that I’ll show you.”
After the Dodgers’ final game in 1960, he tossed his gloves, his spikes, and his dreams into the trash bin, keeping one mitt in case he wanted to play softball in the park on a Sunday afternoon. Nobe Kawano, the clubhouse man, watched as he threw his career away. “If you want to quit, go ahead,” Kawano said. “But I wish you’d leave your arm.”
When the clubhouse emptied and only the season’s dirty laundry remained, Kawano retrieved Koufax’s gear from the trash, packing it away to be shipped to Florida for spring training. The impulse was both sensible and empathic. “In those days, they had to buy their own gloves and shoes,” Kawano said. “They’re not cheap. If he didn’t show up, somebody might be able to use them. You can’t just get those shoes. He had pretty big feet, you know.”
Chapter 10
THE FOURTH INNING
IN THE FOURTH INNING, the authorities caught up with Bill Buhler. He was standing by the screen behind home plate, near the gate where the umpires came out, his camera ready for the top of the inning. He always shot from the same place, the same angle, and always the same usher raised hell. He was vigilant—and adamant. It didn’t matter that Buhler was a Dodger employee, using Dodger equipment. No photographers behind the screen by order of the fire marshal. “Quit jamming up the aisles,” the usher said, “or I’m going over your head.”
Over the years, Buhler had filmed loads of footage of Koufax, maybe a third of a mile. His eye was practiced if not professional. There was no art to it, nothing fancy. His job was instructional, not historical. With only a hundred feet of film he had to skip around, leaving out the pauses between pitches, the idiosyncrasies that give a game its feel. No hitching up the pants, dusting off the plate, rubbing up the ball. The film, consequently, had an edgy, jumpy feel, at variance with the rhythm of Koufax’s delivery. But his view was unimpeded and undiluted. After Koufax quickly retired the first two batters in the top of the fourth, Buhler thought, He looks great.
Scully thought so too. “Koufax, of course, among other things is trying to rewrite the strikeout record, and he’s getting very close to Bob Feller’s mark. Koufax, at the start of the night, needed thirty-one strikeouts to break Bob Feller’s record and he’s picked up four so far tonight. The major league record is three forty-eight. Koufax right now has three twenty-two.”
One of which was his first-inning strikeout of Billy Williams, the Cubs’ hottest hitter, who was at the plate for his second at-bat. “Billy is trying to become only the third player in Chicago Cub history to hit .300, score a hundred runs, have two hundred hits, thirty home runs and drive in a hundred,” Scully said. “It’s never been done by Mantle, Mays, or Mathews.”
In the first inning, Williams was fooled by a hanging curve. This time, the curve made him look foolish. “Sandy broke off a dandy,” Scully said as Williams admired it for strike three.
“There just hasn’t been a visitor to first base,” Scully was saying, when the officious usher returned with an unnamed club vice president who gave Buhler hell for blocking the fire exit. “Pack up and get out,” he said. Buhler had shot two minutes and fifty-six seconds of scratchy, jumpy, black-and-white footage, no runs, no hits, no errors. But he had captured the turning point of the game, Koufax becoming Koufax, getting stronger with each pitch, the sweet, self-replicating motion that lulled and mesmerized; the perfect synchronization of muscle and thought. Afterward, he would turn the film over to the club. As always, it would be developed and screened for Koufax’s use. Sometimes the film would prove helpful. Other times, it broke and ended up in the garbage.
Buhler made his way back to the dugout. The bench remained sanguine even as the Dodgers went three up and three down again. Koufax was pitching. And so was Hendley. The Dodgers knew they were going to win. “At the end of four innings, perfect,” Scully said. “Nobody has gotten nowhere with nobody.”
“Twelve,” Yaroslavsky announced. Fans within earshot were no longer laughing. In the outfield pavilion, Greg Figge put his camera away, wanting to save film for the late innings, just in case. Buhler promised himself he’d find a way back to his spot behind the screen if Koufax still had it going in the ninth inning.
Chapter 11
1961
JOHN ROSEBORO SAID TO MEET HIM in section 123 of Dodger Stadium. It’s tucked beneath the overhang behind third base, far removed from the action and the limelight, offering an oblique angle on home plate, which has always been Roseboro’s outlook if not his view. Section 123 was empty except for an oversized man in faded jeans and a denim shirt trying to get comfortable in a space far too confining for his bulk. His knees knocked against the row in front of him. Roseboro was too big, too outsized to be a spectator. He belonged behind the plate on the other end of what poet Gail Mazur calls “the delicate filament” of concentration that connects pitcher and catcher.
Roseboro looked sturdy enough. In fact, he had been ill. Prostate cancer and a bad heart were taking their toll. He had come to Dodger Stadium on this May evening in an official capacity, surveying National League umpires for the league office. It was his preference to sit apart, away from the scouts and the know-it-alls, the has-beens and the wanna-bes.
In his playing days, opponents called him Rosie, which he never was. Teammates, who knew him better, called him Gabby, which he wasn’t either. But time has made him effusive. Roseboro says he doesn’t like to talk baseball, never took the game home. But the corrosive memories of what it was to be a black man in baseball in the early 1960s have made him voluble.
Branch Rickey created Dodgertown, the original spring training oasis, as a safe haven where black players could live and train with their teammates away from the discrimination of old Florida. Not everyone in town was happy to have them. In the early 1950s, the mayor of Vero Beach went to general manager Buzzie Bavasi to complain about the racial makeup of the team. “He was concerned because we were getting so many black boys in camp,” Bavasi recalled. “He said, ‘We’re worried about our young women.’ I sent Lee Scott down to Gulfstream racetrack, gave him a check for forty thousand dollars, and told him to come back with twenty thousand two-dollar bills. We stayed up all night stamping Brooklyn Dodgers on each of ’em. We had seven hundred fifty people in camp. I gave them all about fifty dollars. I said, ‘Go downtown, have haircuts, go to the movies, eat dinner. If you come back with one dime, you’re going to get fined.’
“When you take forty thousand dollars and spend it in a town of three thousand, they’re going to notice. The mayor came back the next day and said, ‘Buzzie, I get your point.’”
Over time, Dodgertown became burnished in memory as a place where everyone was family and everyone had everything they needed. “Movies! Mass!” exclaimed Chickie Anderson, granddaughter of Steve McKeever, one of Charles Ebbets’s eventual partners. “Oh, it was wonderful.”
For white players, it was an era that generated boys-will-be-boys anecdotes, stories that always begin…Remember when Duke and Zim and Podres got stuck on the railroad tracks racing to get back from the dog track before curfew? Zim, who already had been famously beaned, smashed his head against the dashboard. Duke, who was driving, jammed his bad knee against the steering column. Podres’s head practically went through the roof of the car. “God, was he bleeding,” Zimmer said. “But there’s a train forty, fifty, sixty yards away. And it’s got its light on and it’s at n
ight.” They didn’t wait to find out if it was in locomotion. Jumping out of the car, a Volvo Duke received in an endorsement deal, they lifted it off the tracks and beat it back to Dodgertown.
It wasn’t as carefree a time for black players in Florida. “We were captives,” Maury Wills said. There was nowhere in town to get a haircut; no Laundromats that would accept their laundry. For a good time, they had to go to Gifford, the black quarter, where Junior Gilliam got his nickname, the Devil, playing pool.
“We couldn’t go to the movies,” Roseboro said. “I couldn’t rent a goddamn motel room when my wife and son came down. I had planned to hurt somebody and run into the swamp and stay there a couple of weeks until they found out I wasn’t around.”
When spring training opened in 1961, the stands at Holman Stadium were still segregated; bathroom facilities and water fountains were decidedly separate and unequal. But that spring was redolent with change. There was a young man in the White House, stirring passions with virility and wit, asking impertinent questions of Americans. A sense of imminence pervaded the air, a sub-rosa conviction that the future was now. Tommy Davis, of Brooklyn, New York, was then a lean, scholarly-looking man in wire-frame glasses. He is rounder now. Hunched over a plate of Buffalo wings, he searched for an explanation of the insurgent feelings that overtook him that spring: “It was just there,” he said. “Nobody was really complaining. We didn’t even think about it until one day we looked and said, ‘Let’s change the seating arrangement in the bleachers.’”