Sandy Koufax

by Jane Leavy

  It hit the black protective screen around the public address amplifier on the fly, landing by the monuments in the deepest part of Yankee Stadium. Howard, as huge as he is modest, claims to have hit balls harder. “You’re running, not looking,” he said. “But it came right back to Mantle. With most normal individuals, it would have been a three-base hit. With me it was a double. I had to slide headfirst to get a double. They almost threw me out.”

  Mantle, who had a unique appreciation for a hard-hit ball, hid his admiration in the webbing of his glove. Clete Boyer, the Yankee third baseman, caught him laughing into his leather.

  Skowron stepped to the plate with a .203 batting average and some ambivalence. On the field he was known for his fierce demeanor and his closely cropped hair. Neighborhood kids nicknamed him “Moose” after his grandfather shaved his head. They thought he looked like the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who, Skowron notes, “was big at the time.”

  Skowron had played badly all season, in a funk about having been traded by his beloved Yanks. Alston started him at first base in place of Fairly and Moose vindicated Alston’s hunch with the first of two run-scoring singles. “I felt bad playing against guys I played with all my life,” Skowron said. “I knew Mickey since 1950. I was surprised I was in the lineup. I saw my name and choked a little bit. Fans in the stands were calling me Benedict Arnold. I’m no traitor. I had nothing to do with the trade.”

  Tracewski, another unlikely starter, was up next. He was in the lineup because of an injury to Ken McMullen. Trixie singled in his first world series at-bat. Fortified by his father’s schnapps, Roseboro stepped to the plate. “I went out there and hit a three-run home run,” he said. “It changed everything. Sandy was throwing bee-bees. He was hitting his spots. We won the first game. After that it was a real relaxing series.”

  Pitching with an ease facilitated by an unaccustomed 4–0 margin, Koufax struck out the first two men in the bottom of the second: two guys named Mantle and Maris. With those five consecutive strikeouts, he tied a world series record.

  The first mention of Carl Erskine’s world series strikeout record came in the fifth. Erskine had struck out fourteen Yankees on an October afternoon ten years before. Inning by inning, the strikeouts mounted. Six. Seven. Eight. Everyone in the Stadium—everyone in Erskine’s box—was keeping count. In the seventh, Elston Howard went down swinging. Twelve. And then pinch-hitter Phil Linz in the eighth. Thirteen. And the hometown folks who accompanied Erskine to Yankee Stadium were saying, “Carl, he’s got eleven, twelve, thirteen—wow, you gettin’ nervous?”

  “And,” Erskine remembered, “the crowd kind of picked up on that after a while and so every time he’d rack up another strikeout, the whole section of people would be looking at me to see what I was doing.”

  Briefly, Koufax wavered, his delivery “elbowish,” in Roger Angell’s apt description. He lost his rhythm and his shutout in the eighth on a two-run home run by Tom Tresh. But that moment of vulnerability only served to heighten the drama of the denouement. The Yankees kept going down swinging, and the shadows crept across the outfield grass. Cannon wrote: “Koufax seemed alone, a man engaged in a game of manual solitaire. Only occasionally are you aware of the other eight men on the field.”

  When, in the bottom of the eighth, Richardson struck out for the third time, the big scoreboard in center field flashed the number fourteen. Koufax had tied Erskine’s record. “I can’t say I felt a sense of loss because here’s a teammate who’s doing this,” Erskine said, “and I was just kind of in no-man’s-land watching to see what happened.”

  Koufax led off for the Dodgers in the top of the ninth. The crowd voiced its appreciation. The Brooklyn kid had done the impossible. He had made the Dodgers at home in the Bronx. They gave him a standing ovation and never bothered to sit down. The Dodgers went out in order quickly. As Koufax walked to the mound for the bottom of the ninth, Bob Shepard’s voice reverberated through the stadium, asking fans not to walk on the grass. Horns blared and fans roared, a crescendo with every pitch.

  Elston Howard, the first batter, lined out on the first pitch. Sixty-nine thousand new Dodger fans groaned when Joe Pepitone lifted a foul behind home plate, imploring Roseboro to “Let it go!”—and exhaled when the ball landed safely in the screen behind the plate.

  Pepitone silenced them momentarily, singling to right. Boyer, the only Yankee who hadn’t struck out (though not the only one to claim the distinction), came to the plate. Harry Bright stepped into the on-deck circle behind him. They had ridden to the park together that morning and would ride home again together that night. “I could have been the record, all right?” Boyer said. “But I happen to hit the ball to short or something. So we rode home and he told me, ‘Why didn’t you strike out? I was pulling for you to strike out.’

  “I said, ‘Well, if I had struck out, that’s only two outs, and you would have extended the record.’ We knew we weren’t going to hit it.”

  Bright, a career journeyman, known to his teammates as “Not Too,” gamely approached the plate for his first world series at-bat. He was well aware he represented the potential record-breaking fifteenth strikeout. “I couldn’t miss it,” he said. “It was up there on the Fan-o-tron.”

  He told himself, I’m going to hit the ball out of the ballpark.

  Koufax offered nothing but fastballs. As Scully put it on national TV, “Bright is swinging at thin air.” Each pitch was accompanied by a roar which barely abated before Koufax delivered again. On the radio, Garagiola tried to affect a professional, understated calm.

  Oh and one, fastball swung on and missed.

  High; one and one. Just watching Koufax pitch, you gotta believe he knows he’s one away from breaking it. He’s rearing back. Humming it.

  High; two and one. That’s ball two.

  And the tension builds.

  Swung on and missed! He struck him out!

  Having called Bright out prematurely, Garagiola did not acknowledge either his own excitement or the error it induced.

  Two balls, two strikes. Sandy Koufax within one pitch of breaking it.

  There was no mistake about the next pitch. It wasn’t the shadows creeping across the diamond—they had long since moved out—or the white shirts in deep center field that stymied Bright. It was pure speed. Koufax was quickly engulfed by his teammates, the beak of his cap knocked sideways. He never looked younger. The Yankees never looked older. In the clubhouse, Bright told reporters: “I wait seventeen years to get into a world series and I strike out. That isn’t bad enough: Sixty-nine thousand people were rooting against me.”

  As with Sisyphus, Bright’s fate was inescapable. But Sisyphus didn’t have to see the replays. “I see it every year,” Bright said. “Seems like they always show that segment. People—especially my family—call up and say, ‘Did you see yourself on TV?’”

  He isn’t any happier about it now than he was then. “It was more or less a joke,” he said. “It was true, I was waiting a long time to get in the world series. And here was this nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn and all the fans were rooting for him.”

  Yogi Berra would have been the next hitter—a prospect which, he allowed, made Yogi leery. Instead, Yogi remained on the sidelines, asking the question on everyone’s lips: “How the hell did he lose five?”

  (“He didn’t,” Maury Wills would say later. “We lost them for him.”)

  Erskine was first to greet Koufax at his locker. Four years earlier, when Koufax got his first world series start, Erskine had told him, “I hope you break my record.” Now he’d done it. “And,” Erskine said, “against the same team on the same date, ten years almost to the clock, the hour. An afternoon game on October second against the Yankees. Some of the same lineup—Mantle, at least.

  “Well, I go to his locker and he looked at me and said, ‘You know, Carl, in the eighth inning I just thought to myself how great it would be just to share that record with you.’”

  That evening, Richardson wen
t home to New Jersey and turned on the television, hoping for diversion. But every channel carried the same image. “All they showed was Yankee bats whiffing,” he said. “All those empty swings.”

  Koufax was the “Man in the News” in the next day’s New York Times. It was an understated encomium, headlined “Man with Golden Charm,” and began: “To a gushy Hollywood columnist he is Clark Gable, Gregory Peck and William Holden rolled into one.” The paper of record also noted his fondness for alpaca sweaters and “Hollywood cupcakes.” And his refusal to do liquor or cigarette commercials.

  Johnny Podres, winner of the seventh game of the 1955 World Series, beat the Yankees in game two. On the team bus en route to the airport, Boyer wondered out loud: “Aren’t there any more Jewish holidays?”

  “You mean like Yom Koufax,” Mantle replied.

  Later, the Dodgers would concede the series was a lot closer than it appeared. “One little break could have turned it around,” Tracewski said. But after game one, there was an operatic quality of predestination.

  Some would argue that in the course of those four games, you could sense a seismic shift; the reorganization of the plates beneath the crusty surface of American society. The Bombers were the incarnation of moneyed, East Coast WASPdom: the old-boy network in flannel pinstripes. The Dodgers were the future: the coming of cool. And Koufax was “The Mostest”—as Life magazine described him on its August 2 cover. They were Jews and blacks, speed and daring. Dem Bums had become a symbol of the ascendancy of style.

  Jim Bouton, future author and starter of game three, rejects the cultural imperative analysis. “The seismic shift in power from East to West, the redefining of power from clout to ingenuity, the remaking of the economy from postindustrial to service? No, we’re baseball players. We were not sociologists. None of us knew any sociologists or anthropologists and none of us cared to. After the fact, we didn’t care to talk to any anthropologists either. We wanted another crack at Koufax. We were all convinced we would get to him.”

  The night before game three in Los Angeles, Bouton, the optimist, and Phil Linz, the utility infielder, went to Hollywood Boulevard “hoping people would recognize us and buy us dinner.” Unrecognized and undeterred, they headed for a honky-tonk joint and had a fake headline made up: “Bouton Pitches No-Hitter and Linz Hits Home Run as Yankees Beat Dodgers, 2–0.” They unveiled it on the team bus the next morning.

  None of the 700,000 words filed that day with Western Union resembled theirs. Drysdale pitched what may have been the best game of the series and his career, beating Bouton, 1–0. The Dodgers were one game away from sweeping the mighty Yankees. And they had Sandy Koufax going against Whitey Ford. The Yankees’ bags were packed before game four began.

  On Sunday, October 6, Los Angeles awoke to what Cannon called a “Warner Brothers sky.” It was another star-studded, California day: Danny Kaye, Yul Brynner, Doris Day, Fred MacMurray, Sammy Cahn, Stanley Kramer, and George Stevens were there, as was Eddie Fisher, who sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Women wore sunglasses as big as fantails, their hair stiff as egg whites. Men wore white straw boaters provided by the home team. Irving Koufax and Dick Nen did not attend. Irving was just home from the hospital. In defiance of doctors’ orders, he sneaked an occasional peek at the television. Nen was not on the world series roster and had given away the seats Dodger management had sold him in the upper reaches of Blue Heaven.

  Ford was superb. He gave up only two hits, both to Frank Howard, including a fifth-inning home run he hit one-handed. Koufax was numb, his foot anyway, which had been injected with novocaine for a bothersome corn. He allowed only one run, a Mantle home run so prodigious it made Tracewski’s ears ring. Mel Allen lost his voice on national TV.

  The game was tied 1–1 in the bottom of the seventh inning when Junior Gilliam sent a high bouncer Boyer’s way at third. The morning papers would feature photographs showing Boyer leaping high, cradling the ball, and making the seemingly routine throw to first, where Pepitone, Skowron’s successor, waited. Arrows superimposed upon newsprint traced the trajectory of the ball as it hit Pepitone in the midsection and careened away, trickling down the right-field line. Gilliam raced all the way to third and scored the winning run on a sacrifice fly by Willie Davis.

  Pepitone said he lost the ball in all those white shirts behind third base. Boyer saw it differently. “Joe got there late is what happened,” Boyer said. “It didn’t get lost in the shirts like he said. But the funniest part of the whole thing was in the clubhouse before the first game Whitey had told him, ‘Joe, you’re going to screw up one of these games.’ And now Joe’s sitting talking to the press, feeling bad. And Whitey interrupts him and says, ‘See, Joe, I told you you’d fuck up one of these games.’”

  In the top of the ninth, Koufax faced the heart of the Yankee order, minus Maris, who was injured. Richardson led off with a single. Tresh struck out and Mantle strode to the plate with the opportunity to put the Yankees back in the game and the series. “The press box is throbbing with action,” Scully reported, as cameras panned rows of immobile reporters pecking diligently in anticipation of East Coast deadlines.

  Koufax got ahead in the count: no balls and two strikes. Fans rose, their voices broke; Roseboro got down in his crouch. He never wanted to be a catcher. The Dodgers made him one, he said, because he was big and black and mean and could block the plate. Smart, too, though nobody mentioned that. He and Koufax were more comrades than friends. Rosie liked to say they met at eight o’clock and said, “Let’s kick some ass.” His memories of their times together were not particular: games, counts, at-bats, the asses they kicked. What he remembered was a symbiosis so finely tuned that he could change his mind about the pitch he wanted to call even as Koufax went into his windup and it wouldn’t matter. Because Sandy would have thought of it already.

  As Mantle waited for the 0-and-2 pitch, Roseboro belatedly wiggled two fingers, telling Koufax: Take something off the curve. The book on Mantle said: Never give him anything off-speed to hit, especially when he is batting right-handed. Koufax looked in to Roseboro for the sign, thinking, I’d like to take something off the ball. Then he saw the fingers wiggle.

  It was a huge curve that broke like a cheap folding chair. Mantle took the pitch for a called strike three with arrested equanimity. Then he looked at Roseboro and said, “How in the fuck are you supposed to hit that shit?” The Yankees were down to their final out.

  It figures that the last man up would be Elston Howard, the catcher for whom Bavasi once considered trading Koufax. Howard hit a meek grounder to short. Umpire Tom Gorman called Richardson out on the anticipated force at second. Blue seat cushions drifted down like snowflakes, Koufax leaped high, and Richardson screamed, “Tracewski dropped the ball!” “Calm down,” Tracewski said, admitting he was right. “Sandy didn’t see what happened. He’s jumping. He had to compose himself and pitch to Hector Lopez.”

  Watching at home, Irving Koufax felt a flutter in his chest and turned off the television. Later, his son would tell him, “Dad, at that point I felt a little flutter too.”

  The Yankees had a reprieve but no chance. One out later, Koufax leaped again, though not quite as high. “I had two great thrills that inning,” Koufax said later. “One when I thought it was over. Two when I knew it was over.”

  In the Dodger locker room, there were lox and bagels, beer and champagne—giggly-water, the papers called it then. Koufax and his teammates serenaded Skowron, the Yankee killer, who finished the series with a .385 batting average. “M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-O-S-E!” But Moose was glum. In his heart, he was a Yankee. “I’m no Dodger,” he told Mantle years later. “I was only there one year.” (In fact, he was no longer a Dodger even then: Bavasi had already agreed to trade him to the Senators for the 1964 season.) “What’s the winner’s share?” Moose wanted to know. The answer momentarily assuaged the lump in his throat. It was a record: $12,794.

  After the interviews were done and the champagne sprayed, Koufax went to the Ya
nkee hotel to visit Roger Maris. They’d gotten to know each other a little and Koufax wanted to spend some time with him before Maris left for home. Then he joined his teammates, late for the victory party, just like 1955. But this time he didn’t ask permission. Phil Silvers, the moonlighting comic, reported that the Yankees all signed a petition asking that Yom Kippur be moved permanently to the first week in October.

  The morning paper declared: “The North American continent, said the late Frank Lloyd Wright, tilts to the west and everything loose slides into Southern California. Sunday afternoon the continent tilted once more.”

  Koufax was its axis. Suddenly the game revolved around him. He was the guy who made heads swivel, who made colleagues into fans, so that decades later they would ask to have their picture taken with him and hang it in the front parlor as Richardson did. His guests may not recognize the other guys in the photograph, Stan Musial or Ted Williams. “But they all know Sandy Koufax,” he said.

  The week after the series, Koufax was back in New York to receive the gold ’63 Corvette presented to the Most Valuable Player. The Columbia Spectator ran a story hailing the triumphant return of the former university student. Two young professors, brothers Richard and Barry Zamoff, sent a copy of the campus newspaper to his parents, care of the Dodgers. (A reply from Irving Koufax came soon after: “We are, of course, very proud of our son. Reading your letter, I’m sure that your parents have equal reason to be proud of you both.”)

  By then Koufax had received the keys to the Corvette and a fifteen-dollar ticket from New York’s Finest for parking on the sidewalk outside Cavanagh’s Restaurant. Whitey Ford provided the ultimate testimonial. “Koufax has only two apparent weaknesses,” Ford said. “He can’t park and he can’t hit.”