by Jane Leavy
Solly Hemus, coaching third base, was first among the Mets to realize just how tough it would be. After Koufax struck out the first three men on nine pitches, they crossed paths along the third base line. Hemus murmured, “It’s not that easy, is it?” At the end of the third, Hemus murmured to him again, “Still got a no-hitter going.” Hemus kept murmuring, inning after inning, hoping that agitation would accomplish what the Mets’ bats could not.
The game was still young when a couple of newlyweds climbed into the backseat of their limousine for the ride to their honeymoon hotel. This was back when honeymoons meant something. Turning on the radio, they discovered Koufax had a no-hitter going. Several innings later, when they arrived at their hotel, he still had a no-hitter going. The newlyweds’ first consensual act was an unspoken one: they delayed their own gratification until Koufax consummated his victory over the Mets.
Felix Mantilla was the last batter. They had been teammates in winter ball in Puerto Rico back in the mid-fifties, a time Mantilla remembered well: “He pitched a no-hitter but we lost, two to nothing, because he walked a few guys. Like eight or nine. Or ten.” When Koufax retired him for the twenty-seventh out of his first major league no-hitter, a message flashed on the message board in left center field: “Koufax, report to Buzzie Bavasi and have your contract torn up.”
He was engulfed by teammates and a downpour of cerulean seat cushions. Hemus intercepted him by third base one more time. “He didn’t acknowledge me,” Hemus said. “He didn’t look at me. I wouldn’t let anybody in the ballpark know, so I congratulated him under my breath. Casey would have killed me. Ah, hell, Casey probably would have done the same thing.”
Stengel, the Mets’ inimitable manager, said: “You put the whommy on him but when he’s pitchin’, the whommy tends to go on vacation.”
Koufax acquired a patina of omnipotence. Even his clothes matched. Larry Sherry used to worry whether Koufax would criticize his tie when they went out to dinner. It got annoying, his perfection. Larry was determined to beat him at something. One night in San Francisco, he challenged Koufax to a drinking contest. The bartender set up twenty drinks on the bar, ten shots of vodka for Sherry, ten shots of gin for Koufax, which Larry concedes “was not real smart, but in those days, you know.”
Koufax started at one end of the bar and Larry started at the other, while his brother Norm looked on. “Anyway, I still have the seventh one in my hand and he’d already finished the tenth,” Larry said.
“And he didn’t get drunk!” Normie said. “If he set his mind to it, he’d do anything to beat you.”
Koufax pitched in San Francisco on July 8, his last start before the All-Star Game in Washington. The index finger on his pitching hand had been bothering him since that April game against Pittsburgh, when in an attempt to protect his arm—or perhaps to improve his hitting—he had batted left-handed, and Earl Francis had jammed him with a pitch. The heel of the bat dug into the palm of his hand. A week later, numbness and dread set in. He told no one. Newspapers reported only his triumphs. By May, his index finger had turned white and lifeless. By July, the tissue was close to gangrene. By the time he went to the mound in Candlestick Park, the seams of the ball felt like a serrated edge. Still, he held the Giants hitless into the seventh inning. He left the game in the ninth when his hand went numb.
In Los Angeles, he consulted a vascular specialist. The National League refused the Dodgers’ request to excuse him from the All-Star Game. Who would believe he was hurting?
Four days later in New York, he had another three-hitter going when his hand went numb again. “I touched it,” Stan Williams said. “It was ice cold.” (It remains susceptible to cold even today.) Still, he insisted upon taking his next turn in Cincinnati. Duke Snider, the team captain, took one look at the desiccated finger and said, “Don’t even try it. Do you think anybody around here is going to thank you?”
After years of bitching about not pitching, he wasn’t about to ask out. Before the first inning was over, the finger had split wide open. Newspapers reported he had a mysterious circulatory ailment called Reynaud’s disease, which Williams heard was caused by the diet of a Jewish male, none of which was true. In fact, he had a crushed artery in the palm of his hand. Ten days of experimental intravenous medication successfully reopened the artery. Amputation was the only alternative. He did not pitch again until the end of September. The Giants won the pennant.
In the off-season, “That Index Finger” was the subject of cover stories and anxiety attacks. It was a sight gag in a Vegas lounge act headlined by Milton Berle. Uncle Miltie and several Dodgers—Wills, Snider, Drysdale, Willie Davis, and Koufax—played the Vegas strip for eleven days before taking their act to spring training for a two-week engagement at the Fontainebleau. “How’s the finger?” Berle demanded, nightly.
And Koufax would reply on cue: “I’ve been to the doctor and he says it shouldn’t bother me at all. But now I’ve got a little problem with my thumb.” And he would hold up an outsized thumb, swaddled in bandages.
The concern was misplaced. For the last five years of his career, Koufax was unassailable. He led the majors in every pitching category: most wins (111), lowest ERA (1.95), winning percentage (.766), strikeouts (1,444), shutouts (33), and no-hitters (4). He won the Cy Young Award three times (when only one trophy was awarded for both leagues), the world series MVP award twice, and was named Player of the Decade.
“As far as I’m concerned, no other pitcher in the history of baseball ever put together five years like Koufax did from 1962 to ’66,” Gibson wrote in his 1994 autobiography, Stranger to the Game. “But in light of the fact that Koufax put together nothing more to speak of, I’m unwilling to take a backseat to him as a pitcher…. For that reason, it bothers me some what, just as I’m sure it bothers [Juan] Marichal, to hear and read so often that Koufax was the leading pitcher of our generation. A generation lasts more than five years.”
You can say that. Or you can look at it the way Willie Mays does, his voice rising in incredulity at Gibson’s logic: “For him to do all those things in five years, what guys take twenty years to do, that’s remarkable.”
Marichal now raises gamecocks in the Dominican Republic, birds every bit as fiercely competitive as he was on the mound. “Mr. Gibson was tough,” Marichal said. “I faced Warren Spahn many times. Warren Spahn was the winningest left-hander. I take Sandy any time. I used to sit in a special spot in the dugout just to watch him pitch.”
The 1963 season opened without any intimation of what the fall would bring for the Dodgers or the nation. The pennant race was taut and bracing. Koufax was impeccable. He was, no doubt, aided by the newly redefined National League strike zone and by a full season in pitcher-friendly Chavez Ravine. Twenty of his twenty-five victories were complete games. He finished the year with the most wins, most strikeouts(306), most shutouts (11), and lowest ERA (1.88) in the major leagues. For the first time in his career, he was not called upon to pitch in relief.
In May, there was another no-hitter, against the Giants of Mays and McCovey, no schlubs. The San Francisco broadcasters, mindful of Koufax’s eighteen-strikeout performance in 1959, asked that the game be preserved on videotape, an unusual request. Videotape came in two-inch rolls then. Nobody had room to store them. The game was played on a Saturday night before 55,000, the largest crowd in Chavez Ravine’s short history, the largest crowd in the major leagues. Koufax’s parents, recently relocated to the West Coast, were not among them. He had forgotten to leave them tickets.
The night before, general manager Buzzie Bavasi called Tommy Lasorda and asked if he still had a left-handed catcher’s mitt. Koufax wanted to throw. Throw, he did. “It’s boom, boom, boom,” Lasorda said. “I said, ‘With stuff like that tomorrow you gotta throw a no-hitter.’”
Chuck Connors, the onetime ballplayer turned TV star, had invited Lasorda to Saturday-night dinner. “I said, ‘I can’t,’” Lasorda remembered. “‘I’ve got to go watch Koufax pitch a no-hitter.
’ He said, ‘If you don’t come, I’m going to kill you.’ So I went and listened on the radio. I’ll be goddamned if he didn’t pitch a no-hitter.”
Playing behind Koufax, it was easy to be seduced by passivity. Tommy Davis would not soon forget the look on Koufax’s face when one day he allowed a line drive to sail over his head, having forgotten that Koufax was capable of surrendering one. Nobody in uniform is a spectator during a no-hitter. Davis had just moved from third base to left field when Felipe Alou, the league’s leading hitter, came up in the seventh. “Don’t hit it to me,” Davis was saying to himself when Alou did. Oh, God, it’s a home run, Koufax thought, as Davis retreated for a backhanded “there but for the grace of God go I” catch against the left-field fence. “Did I catch it?” he asked decades later, smiling only when assured he had. “I’m good,” Davis said, relieved.
It was a perfect game until Koufax walked Ed Bailey on a 3-and-2 pitch in the eighth inning. (“Finally, he threw one I couldn’t reach and he walked me.”) In the ninth, Joey Amalfitano, the leadoff batter, popped out. Jose Pagan flied out. McCovey walked on four straight pitches and Harvey Kuenn came to the plate. The score was 8–0. Only the no-hitter was in doubt. Kuenn took one strike before tepidly bouncing back to the mound. Fairly, the first baseman, took a deep breath. He knew from painful past experience that Koufax was constitutionally incapable of tossing a ball softly. Years earlier, in Fairly’s initial game at first base, Koufax had fired a ball at him at point-blank range. “Threw it between my legs and chipped my cup,” Fairly would remember. “It almost killed me.”
Koufax remembered too. He thought to run the ball to first and then changed his mind, scooping it underhanded instead. Fairly caught the ball and exhaled.
By August 25, his record was 19 and 5. He was one out away from his first-ever twenty-win season when Alston removed him from the game. As Alston walked to the mound, Koufax stalked away from it, leaving the manager to wait alone for the unwelcome reliever. Heading back to the dugout, Koufax hurled his glove against the bench; Alston was inundated with home-grown boos. For Dave Smith, a young fan sitting high above home plate, the display of temper was as stunning as Alston’s decision. It was such a departure from Koufax’s usual elegant self-containment. He wouldn’t lose again until 1964.
In his next start, Koufax got his twentieth win, beating the Giants 11–1, to give the Dodgers a seven-game lead over San Francisco. On September 6, he beat the Giants again, his twenty-second win, and returned to Los Angeles to be with his father, who had suffered a minor heart attack. Beat reporters respected his request and did not write about Irving Koufax’s illness. When his father was out of danger, Koufax rejoined the team in Pittsburgh. The three-way pennant race had grown so tight, St. Louis TV stations were showing Dodger and Giant games—this in an era when few home games were broadcast.
By the time the Dodgers arrived in St. Louis on September 16 for a decisive three-game series, their National League lead was down to a single game. The Redbirds had won ten straight. The number one hit in town was the Spike Jones standard “Pass the Biscuits, Mirandy,” the anthem of the 1942 Cardinals. “The series has already been banned by the American Heart Association,” Jim Murray wrote in the Los Angeles Times.
There were twelve games left in the season and in Stan Musial’s career. One hundred sportswriters wrote one hundred thousand words about game one. Musial, a new grandfather, defied time, pulling a fast ball over the right-field wall. The Dodgers went on to win the game, a thriller, in the ninth. But it was Musial’s at-bat that Koufax would remember when he pitched the next day.
He spent the morning before the game reading Nation of Sheep, a study of American conformity. That evening, he delivered a doctoral dissertation in the art of pacifying major league hitters. As Pee Wee Reese liked to say of him, “He doesn’t think like a left-hander—he’s smarter than that.”
Koufax believed in the outside corner of the plate the way some people believe in reincarnation. It was a tenet of his faith that anyone who can put a fastball on the outside corner of the plate 85 percent of the time can win fifteen games in the major leagues. He never believed in just getting a pitch over; every one had a purpose. Throwing strikes? Overrated dogma. Challenging a power hitter inside? Macho posturing. His job was to train the home plate umpire to define the strike zone as he saw it, expanding it inch by inch, inning by inning, cajoling him into giving a little more, and then a little more. When, finally, he had a batter where he wanted him, leaning out over the plate, he’d come inside—and then go outside again. “You pitch outside, you throw inside,” he liked to say.
Roseboro was catching that night. His solemn, masked face was the one Koufax envisioned on the receiving end of every successful pitch. Theirs was a telepathic battery. They always tried to exploit a hitter’s vanity. “The littlest SOB wants to be a star,” Roseboro said. “He doesn’t want to hit a blooper to right. He wants to hit a ball out of that dang ballpark. And we’re saying: ‘Here, hit this goddamn fastball on the outside corner, I defy you to hit it. Hit that sucker four hundred and fifty feet to right field.’ God can’t hit it to right field.”
Mike Shannon, the Cardinals’ outfielder, prepared for Koufax with an imaginary cigar box. All night before the game, he’d visualize this cigar box hovering over the outside corner of the plate. He saw it when he went to bed and he saw it when he got up in the morning and when he finally got up to the plate, carrying the image with him like a baby’s blankie. If a pitch happened to land in the box, he swung. Occasionally, he got lucky. Cardinals manager Johnny Keane had grown so tired of watching his players trying to pull those outside pitches, he threatened to fine anyone who attempted it five hundred dollars. “Ten minutes before the game he called us all in and said, ‘You know, we haven’t hit Koufax very well,’” catcher Tim McCarver recalled. “This was supposed to be like a vision that John had. He said, ‘And I’ve decided that we all ought to try to go the other way against him.’”
Musial didn’t need to be told. The score was 1–0 when he led off in the bottom of the seventh, determined to do what he had done the night before. Koufax was equally determined not to allow it. Musial lined the second pitch, a low outside fastball, to left center for the first of the Cardinals’ four hits. It wasn’t a mistake; it was just where Koufax wanted it to be. He lost the no-hitter but won the contest and the game, 4–0. It was Koufax’s eleventh shutout of the season, a major league record for left-handers. He had thrown eighty-six pitches, only twenty of them balls. After the game, Drysdale told reporters: “He’s the only pitcher I’ve ever seen if he pitched a no-hitter every time I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.” Las Vegas bookmakers took the pennant race off the board.
Irvin Muchnick, a nine-year-old boy sitting behind a pole in section U-V, remembers the epithets he heard that night as a sheltered suburban kid’s first brush with anti-Semitism: “I recall that it was a hot night and that the beer guzzlers in the crowd were frustrated after the Redbirds’ giddy nineteen-out-of-twenty run that had brought them within a game of the Dodgers. By the fourth or fifth inning some of them were yelling, ‘You kike.’ Maybe someone said, ‘fucking Jew,’ but, come to think of it, I doubt it; I don’t believe even drunks said ‘fuck’ in public in St. Louis in those days. Musial later wrote of this middle game of the series against Koufax, ‘We couldn’t have scored if we played all night.’”
The next evening, a Dodger rookie named Dick Nen officially put the Cardinals out of their misery. Nen had been called up from Spokane that morning. After he pinch-hit for Fairly in the eighth, coach Lee Walls told him to ask Alston if the manager wanted him to stay in the game and play first. Nen couldn’t decide which was worse: talking to Alston or disobeying the coach. He approached the manager with trepidation. “Skip says, ‘Oh, that’s right, you’re a first baseman, you go play first.’ That’s how I got to stay in the game.”
When he came to bat again in the ninth, the Cardinals were ahead by a run. Nen’s father, Sam, and h
is sister, Donna, were at home watching on TV. His mother was at church praying for the Dodgers. “Back in those days, there weren’t a whole lot of sporting events on TV,” Nen said. “But that game was on TV. It seems like everyone in Southern California watched it. No matter where I go, what I do, people recognize the name. People say, ‘You’re not…’ And I say, ‘Yeah, I am.’”
(He is also the father of the Giants’ star relief pitcher Robb Nen.)
When Nen tied the game with a home run into the right-field stands, his mother rushed back from church to make his favorite spaghetti sauce. By the time the Dodgers won it in thirteen innings, the pot was boiling on the stove. When the Dodger plane touched down in Los Angeles at 4:08 A.M., a spaghetti breakfast was waiting for him.
Koufax didn’t know anything about Nen’s home run until he read about it in the paper the next day. He had flown home to Los Angeles to be with his parents for the Jewish New Year.
By the fall of 1963, television had insinuated itself into the fabric of American life. Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, had already declared it a vast wasteland. Live TV took on a new meaning for those who saw Lee Harvey Oswald shot to death in Dallas. Four days later, at the annual Army-Navy game, instant replay was used for the first time. Writing his world series preview for the San Diego Union, Phil Collier confidently predicted the largest nationwide television audience ever to witness a sporting event. Phil Silvers, the TV comedian and guest columnist for the Los Angeles Times, bragged about not going to the games. Silvers wrote that he was staying home to watch on color TV: “This is a strange way to cover a world series but I suppose I and all my sportswriting colleagues might as well face it. This is the trend of the future.” NBC estimates that 22 million American homes tuned in to the 1963 World Series. Games three and four remain on baseball’s top-ten list of the most-watched broadcasts in history.