Sandy Koufax

by Jane Leavy

  Chapter 14

  THE SIXTH INNING

  CLAUDE OSTEEN WAS LYING in his shorts on a training table in the clubhouse listening to Jerry Doggett tout the virtues of Royal “76” Premium gasoline. It was getting late in the game and late in the season when arms tire and bodies need assuaging. Drysdale, who was scheduled to start against Houston the next evening, lay on the table beside him. It was Osteen’s first year with the Dodgers, having escaped last place in the American League in an off-season trade with the ignominious Washington Senators. At twenty-six, Osteen was no rookie but he felt like one in Drysdale’s presence. Everyone felt small in Drysdale’s presence. He was the team enforcer; whether standing on the dugout steps, bat ominously in hand, the day-game sun glinting off his California-white teeth, or getting treatment in the training room. His entire being commanded authority. “Get up,” Drysdale said suddenly. “Get your uniform on. You gotta watch this.”

  When Drysdale said “Get up,” you got up—even if you were lying on the training table half naked and it was the sixth inning and a violation of baseball etiquette to do so. No one in the dugout or the press box could say how many times before Koufax had carried a no-hitter into the sixth inning. His teammates generally accepted the fact that he’d have one through four or five because it seemed like he always did. Later, they would count them up and be astonished all over again: nine times, not including the no-hitters, he had held the other team hitless through six innings.

  The sixth inning of a no-hitter will either be remembered as the necessary pause before a classic denouement or it won’t be remembered at all. The dramatic tension derives from not knowing which. The line between the mundane and the heroic is drawn with every pitch, every potential passed ball, every errant bounce. In this instance, the tension was compounded by the improbable symmetry of the line score. On the field, in the stands, on the respective benches there was a coming to consciousness of what lay ahead. Hendley was hanging on. Koufax was getting stronger. “You could smell that something big was about to happen,” Osteen said.

  It figures that Drysdale would smell it before anyone else. Their lives and fates were inextricably linked. After all, they virtually grew up together. They had been teammates for eleven years. The Dodgers were nothing without them. And without each other, neither would have been what each became. Righty, lefty, gentile, Jew. Everything about them was opposite except their purpose. Drysdale came sidearm; Koufax came over the top. Drysdale’s ball beat you up, Koufax’s rose to greet you. “Drysdale was like going to the dentist without Novocain,” Joey A. liked to say. “Sandy had the Novocain.” Facing him was painful only in retrospect.

  If Koufax was a shooting star, Drysdale was a full moon. Both were essential but one was sublime. The closest Drysdale had ever come to throwing a no-hitter was a one-hitter against the Cardinals in May. A first-inning single removed all the anxiety from the effort. Big D knew better than anyone the infinitesimal difference between excellence and dominance; he inhabited that place. So there he was, all six feet six inches of him, climbing off the training table in his undershorts, going to his locker, and putting on the uniform, that big 53. That’s what stunned Osteen most: “Drysdale’s acceptance of what this guy could do that no one else, including himself, could do.”

  Drysdale’s arrival in the dugout compounded the hush and the sense of occasion. Everyone knew what was going on. The Cubs were no longer just facing Koufax. They were facing an inchoate realization: Uhoh, he found it. The curveball was breaking. The fastball was gathering force. “Each pitch,” Osteen said, “harder than the last.”

  The Cubs were restive, jiggling with nervous energy, everyone desperate to change something, anything. For five innings, they had been telling themselves all the right things: We still got a chance. We’re only down one. One swing of the bat, you never know. But due up in the sixth was the bottom of the order: Krug, Kessinger, and Hendley.

  It would be human to weaken in the face of such tepid opposition. Koufax was unrelenting. “Two-hundred hitters hit two hundred for a reason,” he liked to say. Drysdale knew if he got past the seventh, eighth, and ninth men in the batting order, the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings would be something to see.

  The Dodger dugout exuded a studied nonchalance that soon gave way to superstition. The impulse was conservative. If you change nothing, then perhaps nothing will change. So you sit in the same seat, cross your legs the same way, tilt your cap in the same direction. If you’re Maury Wills and you’ve been sitting beside Koufax on a stool in the runway between innings where you can have a smoke without being noticed, you make sure to sit there again. The one thing you don’t do is mention the obvious.

  We got a double no-hitter going here, Krug thought, swinging a bat in the on-deck circle. His errant throw was all that stood between what was and what could have been. It is baseball’s way to juxtapose failure and redemption with comic regularity. Thus, Krug would remember this at-bat with uncommon specificity. How the pedestrian grounder he hit to short was gobbled up by Wills who threw it in the dirt to first baseman Wes Parker. And how Wills hollered thank you across the diamond after Parker dug it out. In truth, Parker had never been so scared in his life. God, he thought, I don’t want to blow this guy’s chance at immortality.

  Kessinger, the shortstop, was next. After fouling back a fastball for strike one, Kessinger stepped out of the batter’s box and exchanged a meaningful look with the home plate umpire. Vargo had seen that look before. Scully too: “Mitts are popping,” he said. “The Cubs have a couple of fellas loosening up down there. But Hendley’s out on deck.”

  Kessinger hit a hopeful dribbler down the third base line. It was a nothing ball—the kind on which so much can turn. Its weakness was its potential strength. In its timid trajectory Kessinger found cause for optimism. But Gilliam was playing in at third to guard against a bunt. “I thought I had a chance to beat it out,” Kessinger said. “I got thrown out by half a step.”

  As he headed back to the bench, Kessinger couldn’t help thinking about the Hollywood crowd: late to arrive, early to leave, slow to grasp what they were seeing. Arriving just as we’re leaving, he thought, with a small smile.

  The dugout lacked the usual baseball chatter, a form of surrender. Byron Browne kept waiting for someone to say something, break the spell: “This fool is trying to throw a no-hitter at us!” But he was a rookie. It wasn’t his place.

  With two down, Klein allowed Hendley to hit for himself. The man was still pitching a no-hitter. Besides, Klein was saving Amalfitano for later. As Hendley meekly and predictably struck out again, Richard Hume recorded the totals: no runs, no hits, no errors. Nothing had happened but everything had changed.

  “In case you are speculating, down through the years, there’s been one gem, one double no-hitter,” Scully noted. “We’ll tell you more about it if and when we get to that stage. There’s never been a perfect game on one side and a one-hitter on the other side…yet.”

  Musing aloud, Scully gave everyone within the sound of his voice permission to consider the possibilities. What had been murmured (or muttered) was now articulated. Adams, Davis, DeLury, Buhler, Hume, Soboroff, Pinsky, Figge, Epstein, Zaroslavsky (still counting), and God knows how many others were thinking the same thing. I think he has a chance. When Koufax returned to the dugout, Drysdale vacated the stool in the runway. In abdicating the seat, Drysdale was yielding not just to superstition but to reality.

  In the Cubs dugout, Joey A. got up from his seat too and sought out Ron Santo: “Hey, Ronnie, somebody must have pissed him off.” Santo nodded. Jogging back onto the field, he told Beckert, “Yeah, you’re right. He doesn’t have shit.”

  Chapter 15

  PULLING TEETH

  TWO MONTHS AFTER arthroscopic knee surgery, Koufax stepped to the first tee at the Shadow Ridge Country Club in Omaha, Nebraska. No one, including him, thought much about it. Walking eighteen holes eight weeks after knee surgery was in no way extraordinary for a sixty-
three-year-old man in the last year of the twentieth century. What may have been just another round of charity golf was also evidence of the revolution in the treatment of movable human parts.

  Koufax looked good, especially compared to the other notables Bob Gibson had corralled for the annual event. Jim McMahon, onetime primetime quarterback for the Chicago Bears, showed up in Ray-Bans and flip-flops, cradling a six-pack. Orlando “Cha Cha” Cepeda, newly inducted into the Hall of Fame, was resplendent in a three-piece, burnt-orange zoot suit. “Sweet Lou” Johnson packed his effusive self into a snugly fitting “Bob Gibson All-Star Classic” golf shirt. Koufax wore his own shirt—an impressionistic tableau of palm trees and blue skies.

  The course, carved out of a former cornfield, was named Shadow Ridge but there weren’t any shadows except for the ones cast by the celebrities, none bigger than Koufax. At the first tee, a gallery of two hundred eager midwesterners awaited him, old guys wearing replica Jackie Robinson jerseys, young kids in Yankee caps, and a few enterprising autograph merchants lugging duffel bags full of memorabilia and disguises to change into once Koufax caught on to their act. The pros are always easy to spot—they come equipped with accoutrements and attitude, affecting the easy pose of townies on every main drag of America, eagle eyes searching the horizon for prey. They mobilized at the sight of him, pushing less mercenary souls out of the way. Al Meyers, a twenty-eight-year-old man in a Celtics jacket, stuffed his one ball back in his pocket. “I came for my dad,” he said.

  His father, a Koufax devotee ever since seeing him play basketball in high school, had a Legion ball game to coach. His stand-in, Al, hung back, too shy to venture forward as Johnson wrapped Koufax in a bear hug; but close enough to hear Koufax whisper, “My neck’s killing me.”

  Johnson cackled when Koufax’s first shot soared straight and long off the tee. By the thirteenth hole, however, Koufax was surveying the crowd for a chiropractor. Dr. Mark Cobleigh stepped forward and wrenched Koufax’s neck into alignment. “If I get a hole in one you had nothing to do with it,” he told Cobleigh, smiling.

  Sometimes his neck is so bad he can’t get out of bed; sometimes it’s his back. He’s had surgery on his rotator cuff and arthroscopic surgery on both knees and he still can’t straighten his left arm. Vin Scully, the Dodger broadcaster, was with him one day on a golf course when a well-meaning pro suggested Koufax would shoot better if he straightened his arm on his follow-through. “If I could straighten my arm, I’d still be pitching,” he replied.

  People ask all the time how it is. “Does it bother you?” an Omaha reporter inquired, trailing him down the fairway. “Only when I throw,” Koufax said. He doesn’t.

  When Koufax was a rookie, there was no such thing as sports medicine. You didn’t rehab injuries. You lived with them, grew old with them. You ached, you got a rubdown. You hurt, you put on some heat. Ice was for martinis, not elbows. “Milking your arm” was considered high-tech medicine. Rubbing the fluid out of engorged fingers enabled married guys to put their wedding rings back on—when they chose to. In the spring of 1955, Karl Spooner was the pitching phenom that Koufax eventually became. When his arm went bad, the Dodgers were understandably reluctant to give up on him. They tried everything, including pulling his teeth—they thought maybe poison was leaking into his shoulder joint.

  Every pitching arm is doomed. Soft tissue and bone can only give so much. Koufax, like so many other pitchers before him, was doomed by the time in which he lived. He pitched on the cusp of a revolution. He was born a decade too soon. “He came from an era of sacrificial lambs,” said Dr. Marilyn Pink, former director of the UCLA biomechanics lab. “You wore people out until they anatomically could not proceed.”

  As regard for him grew, so did an inchoate sense that he was living on borrowed time. He and the Dodger trainers understood the paradox of his build. That which made him special also made him vulnerable. “Doc” Anderson, who worked on him for an hour and a half before every start, told reporters Koufax had “extreme” muscles, “the largest I ever worked on, and that includes Ted Kluszewski and Frank Howard. Muscles like that aren’t ideal for a pitcher, but then I’ve always said that Sandy Koufax wasn’t built to be a pitcher.”

  It was an anatomical pact with the devil. “Since I have accepted all the advantages of the way I am built,” Koufax said, “I don’t see how I can complain about the disadvantages.”

  The biggest advantage were hands that spun miracles out of horsehide. One night in a hotel bar in Milwaukee, umpires Doug Harvey and Jocko Conlan were having a drink when Koufax came in, sat down, and sent over a couple of beers. “I immediately ordered him a drink,” Harvey said. “’Cause Jocko said, ‘We don’t take nothing from nobody.’ In those days, that’s the way the great umpires were. I said, ‘Sandy, put your hand up here.’ And I took the base of my hand and put it against the base of his left hand. And it just went up. His fingers must have extended beyond my hand by an inch and a half.”

  When Koufax put up his hand, he put down his World Series lighter with his name and the image of Dodger Stadium engraved on it. Later, when Harvey got up to leave, the barkeep said, “Here, this is yours.” He was tempted to keep it. “I carried it around until the next time I saw him,” Harvey said. “He gave me his glove as a way of saying thanks.”

  Spring training 1964 arrived with high expectations and cautionary notes. He had won the 1963 Cy Young Award (unanimously), the National League MVP Award, and the Hickok Belt as Professional Athlete of the Year—not to mention the B’nai B’rith Sports Lodge Award and the Barrett Belt, a rhinestone-encrusted jockstrap from a steak house in Vero Beach. He was voted the Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year, United Press International Player of the Year, the Sporting News Player of the Year, Fraternal Order of Eagle Man of the Year, Southern California Athlete of the Year, and Comeback Player of the Year. He was feted while JFK was mourned.

  It was also during that cruel off-season that the Beatles debuted on the Ed Sullivan Show and Cassius Clay shocked the world, first by defeating Sonny Liston and then by changing his name to Muhammad Ali. Koufax was busy eating rubber chicken at dinners in Toronto, Columbus, Rochester, Boston, Philadelphia, Houston, and Chicago, where Jerry Holtzman, the baseball writer, took him to his daughter’s twelfth birthday party and all the girls squealed like he was John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

  Other young ladies were rendered mute. Sharon Morris Perez was a fifteen-year-old student at an all-girls Catholic school when she met him in Cincinnati. “There I stood in my Notre Dame uniform with my funny shoes, clutching a yearbook. All of a sudden he was standing right there in front of me. All I can remember is that my entire insides were screaming, ‘It’s really Sandy Koufax!’ However, not one sound came out of my mouth. Nothing. He picked up the yearbook and asked my name. Nothing. He even asked my name twice. Nothing. He signed the yearbook and was gone. I couldn’t even say thank you.”

  In New York, he was serenaded by the Baseball Writers Association of America. “You’re a Jewish Walter Johnson, Sandy boy, Sandy boy.” Casey Stengel opined: “Forget the other fellow, Walter Johnson. The Jewish kid is probably the best of them.”

  Camp opened and the great expectations of winter soon gave way to a desultory spring. Koufax threw an unusual number of slow curves and change-ups. He confided in Phil Collier: his arm was hurting and he hadn’t signed his contract yet. In an exhibition game on April 6, Koufax went nine innings and beat the Yankees—again. Johnny Werhas was his roommate that spring—young, impressionable. “The next morning his arm had almost doubled in size,” Werhas said. “I guess water, fluid, had gotten on his elbow. It scared me to death for him. I yelled, ‘Sandy, your arm!’ He says, ‘Oh, man, that happens.’”

  On April 22, in St. Louis, Koufax made his third start of the season. Top of the first, one ball and two strikes on Bill White, he felt something let go in his arm. White went to first on the strikeout wild pitch. “Only way I got to first on him,” White would say later. Koufax left
the game at the end of the inning. Allan Roth, the Dodger statistician, noted on his scorecard that Koufax’s elbow was “stiff from the start.”

  The injury would be variously described in the morning papers as a torn muscle or torn adhesions that had built up in his pitching arm. The examination by the Cardinals’ doctor, I. C. Middleman, revealed “exquisite tenderness.” “Sandy told me his arm had been hurting on and off since spring training,” Middleman said. “He hadn’t bothered to report it, feeling he could work it out. He is extremely tender and has a swelling on the inside of his left forearm. It is rigid and just like a hot dog.”

  Ominously, Middleman added, “He also has an inflammation on his left elbow.”

  Koufax flew back to Los Angeles to be examined by Dr. Robert Kerlan, the Dodgers’ team physician. He had three cortisone shots and skipped three starts before returning to the rotation in May. In a time of national cataclysm, baseball injuries were an afterthought. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in July. In August, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf resolution, legalizing the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Two days later, the bodies of three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, were found on a farm outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. The Republicans nominated über-conservative Barry Goldwater for president. The Democrats countered with the notorious and short-lived political ad showing a little girl picking daisies in the shadow of a mushroom cloud.

  Koufax was struggling with a 5-and-4 record when the Dodgers arrived in Philadelphia in early June. In the modern era, a staff of team videographers would have provided him constant visual feedback on his mechanics and delivery. Today, at Dodger Stadium, hitters immediately review their at-bats in a screening room adjacent to the clubhouse. On the road, they carry camcorders. But, the world was a more random place in 1964. By chance, Koufax came across a dog-eared issue of Sport magazine in the Philadelphia locker room and a photo taken during his 1963 no-hitter over the Giants. The picture was shot from an angle he hadn’t seen before and it revealed an undetected flaw in his stride. Three innings into his start against the Phillies, he was himself again.