by Jane Leavy
In the bottom of the fourth, with the count full on Richie Allen, catcher Doug Camilli called for a curve. Koufax shook him off. Allen, he knew, was one of the few truly great curveball hitters in the game. “Then while I was winding up I thought to myself, Doug’s right, a curveball would be better,” he told reporters later. “But I didn’t think fast enough and instead of stepping off the rubber I went through with the fastball and it was low, no doubt about that.”
The difference between a ball and a strike is the width of a pencil in an umpire’s eye. He has a third, maybe a fourth of a second to make the call. “It was close,” Camilli said.
“They’re all close,” home plate umpire Ed Vargo said.
No one complained. And, a few pitches later, Camilli threw Allen out trying to steal second. Who knew he would be the first and last Phillie to reach base all night?
By the bottom of the ninth, Philadelphia manager Gene Mauch was desperate. Koufax had a 3–0 lead, thanks to Frank Howard’s preemptive home run, and a chance to become only the second man in the modern era (after Bob Feller) to pitch three no-hitters. Werhas watched Mauch’s managerial maneuvering from the Dodger bench: “He sent a couple of players to the bullpen, which was way out in right field. They had to go across the field to get to the bullpen. Then he brought them in one by one to try and throw Sandy’s timing off, try and break up the no-hitter.”
To no avail. Tony Taylor struck out. Ruben Amaro popped out. With two down, Mauch summoned Bobby Wine, one of the guys he had sent to the bullpen, to pinch-hit for pitcher Ray Culp. “Sandy’s just staring at Mauch, knowing exactly what Mauch was doing,” Werhas said. “I remember thinking, There’s no way they’re going to get a hit off him. To me that was tugging on the cape. You don’t do that.”
Wine had a .203 batting average and an unenviable task. “We had thirty thousand people in Connie Mack Stadium,” Wine said. “They always sold out when the Dodgers were in town. I go up and I know none of these people are rooting for me. Let’s face it, there were not a lot of people outside my family rooting for me. Guys in the on-deck circle were saying, ‘God, I hope he makes an out so I don’t have to hit.’”
The first pitch was high; the second was fouled off Vargo’s mask. The Phillies’ trainer came quickly with smelling salts—too quickly in Wine’s opinion. “He’s half chokin’, half coughin’, and says, ‘C’mon, c’mon, I don’t want him to get cold.’ I said, ‘Eddie, take your time.’ Two pitches later, he was in the clubhouse and healthy again.”
Vargo celebrated his first no-hitter by drinking a beer with a straw; Koufax celebrated his third with three beers and a date with a tub of ice. As always on nights when he pitched, he was last to board the team bus. Nobody minded. The Dodgers weren’t going anywhere without him. Drysdale, the other vital cog in their pennant hopes, wasn’t with the team. He was in Washington on business when he heard about the no-hitter over the radio. The announcer neglected to mention the score. “Yeah,” Drysdale said, impatiently, “but did he win?” With the Dodger offense, you never knew.
The bus idled. The team was headed for New York, where he was going to be feted at Shea Stadium by his old sandlot pals. Joe Moeller, the $80,000 bonus-baby pitcher, was sitting by himself contemplating his scheduled start the next evening. As usual, the seat beside him was empty. What if he sits down? Moeller thought. What am I going to say to this guy?
“Guys cheered when he got on. He was shy, making some joke about it, like, ‘Let’s get to a real city.’ He sat down, turned to me, and said, ‘You know, I got away with a pitch. I hung a curve to Wine.’”
One pitch shy of perfection and all he can talk about is a pitch that could have been hit but wasn’t. Mauch was so impressed, he resolved not to allow Koufax to face his team again. The Dodgers were due back in town at the beginning of August and again in early September over the Jewish New Year. He knew Koufax wouldn’t pitch then. So August was his only problem. For seven weeks, Mauch plotted. On the morning of August 3, the day Koufax was to face the Phillies again, Mauch called the stadium manager: “If one drop, one drop! of rain falls, I want this game called.” In fact, he threatened to go up on the roof of Connie Mack Stadium with a hose.
That afternoon, Alston called a meeting at the team hotel. The world champions were a .500 ball club, languishing in seventh place, nine games behind the Phillies. The year before, on another East Coast road trip, Alston had challenged his players to fisticuffs. The Dodgers were traveling in an un-air-conditioned bus at the time. When they saw the Pittsburgh Pirates sail down the highway in a state-of-the-art Greyhound, there had been a near mutiny. But, Alston was loosening up, becoming more modern, “more smiley,” as Tracewski put it. During the meeting at the Warwick Hotel, he made the mistake of asking if anyone had anything to say. “Everybody was airing their grievances,” Tracewski said. “Sandy said something about him being no fun to play for and being too subservient to Buzzie. He said he should be more assertive with running the ball club. He said, ‘This is your ball club.’”
When, finally, the meeting was interrupted by a telephone call informing Alston that the game had been called on account of rain, the sun was shining brightly over the team hotel. And over Connie Mack Stadium, too. When Wine got there, the clubhouse man said, “The game’s been called. They think it’s going to rain.”
Mauch’s triumph was short-lived. The Phillies managed to fold without facing Koufax again. His season was over by the second week of August, his career in jeopardy. August 8 found the Dodgers in Milwaukee and in sixth place. That night, Koufax won his seventeenth game, becoming the first National League pitcher in the modern era to strike out 200 hitters four consecutive seasons. He also singled and scored to begin the winning rally. Reaching base proved a costly mistake. Diving back into second to beat a pick-off throw, he jammed his pitching arm into the bag. He was safe; his elbow wasn’t.
The morning paper made no mention of it. The big news was that he was experimenting with a new pitch, a forkball. He won his next two starts and was leading the league with a record of 19 and 5. But the morning after his nineteenth win, a shutout in which he fanned thirteen, he couldn’t straighten his arm. The joint squished. Pockets of fluid protruded from beneath the skin like hard-boiled eggs. His elbow was as big as his knee. The only difference was his knee bent. He had to drag his arm out of bed like a log. A waterlogged log.
Tests were run; X rays were ordered. Kerlan took one look at the films and gave him the bad news: traumatic arthritis. A diagnosis without a cure. Arthritis is an acute inflammation of a joint usually associated with old age. Koufax’s arm was old even if he wasn’t. Pitch by pitch, season by season, the cartilage in his elbow was breaking down.
Kerlan knew the long-term prospects weren’t good and the options weren’t much better. His diagnosis was not made public. “Sore arm,” the Dodgers said. Headlines grew progressively dire as he missed first one, then two, then three starts. “Koufax Injures Elbow”; “Koufax Out Indefinitely”; “Koufax Arm Test Proves Washout.” And finally on August 31: “Koufax Probably Through for Year.”
Pitching is trauma. The human elbow may be God’s greatest invention but He didn’t anticipate a major league fastball during those first seven days. The moment of maximum stress, the subject of so many grim-great photographs, occurs just as a pitcher finishes cocking his arm and it begins to accelerate forward. The elbow is flexed 85 to 95 out of a possible 150 degrees, the anatomical arc just shy of a semicircle. The change of direction, as the arm propels itself forward, is an insult to flesh and bone. It lasts, scientists now know, no more than 3/100s of a second. But in that wisp of time, the arm is moving at a speed of 7,000 degrees per second. At that rate, the second hand of a clock would complete nineteen and a half revolutions in a tick of a clock. The elbow is subjected to what doctors call “maximum load” as two contrary forces, momentum and inertia, converge on the joint. The medical name for this violation is a “valgus torque.” It causes ligaments to stretch like sal
t water taffy on a hot summer day.
Kerlan’s diagnosis was circumscribed by technology. It wasn’t until the invention of the arthroscope that doctors gained a real understanding of the interior landscape of the joint. The first rudimentary arthroscope, a diagnostic tool fashioned out of urological instruments and a flashlight, was invented in the 1930s. Modern arthroscopy did not become available until the early 1970s. Initially, it was solely a diagnostic tool, literally giving surgeons the ability to “scope out” the inside of a joint. Surgical procedures using the arthroscope did not become available until the mid-1980s, first on shoulders and knees. Elbows were too small to explore.
“Repetitive impulsive loading”—the clinician’s way of describing the act of throwing—isn’t good for human cartilage. Cartilage doesn’t swell and it doesn’t heal. It only breaks down, causing a plethora of outraged responses in surrounding tissues. The medial collateral ligament, the major stabilizing force in the joint, bears the brunt of the assault. The collagen fibers which compose it stretch and tear. The synovial lining fills the joint with liquid in an attempt to protect ligament and bone. (Water on the knee or elbow, it used to be called.) Bone spurs form as the body attempts to replace weakened tissue with something stronger.
Today, “scoping” elbows and knees—to use the locker room vernacular—allows professional athletes and middle-age golfers like Koufax to return to competition in a fraction of the previous time. Dr. Frank Jobe, Kerlan’s partner and successor, performed the first elbow reconstruction less than a decade after Koufax retired. Tommy John, the surgical pioneer, returned to baseball and pitched for another twelve years. Koufax never had the surgery; it was unnecessary for civilian life. “Today,” Jobe said, “we’d take off the spurs, but not any extra bone. We’d replace the medial collateral ligament using a tendon out of his forearm, then give him a year of rehab and he’d come back to pitch.
“If you had said to Dr. Kerlan, ‘Why does his arm hurt?’ he’d say, ‘Because he throws so hard.’ That’s true. What he didn’t know was that he threw hard enough to stretch a ligament. It wasn’t torn but it was stretched enough to allow two bony surfaces to rub together. Now we understand that if you have loose ligaments, then you have impingement into the arm bone whenever you throw. I can understand now a lot better than I could when he retired. It must have just killed him.”
Koufax always scoffs at such reports. “My heroism is greatly overstated,” he’ll say, as he did to the floating gallery following him through the former Nebraska cornfield. On occasion, he’s been known to admit, “Maybe I just didn’t want to think about how bad it was.”
At the time, draining, icing, and waiting were his only options. A recurrence was inevitable.
March is the cruelest month for pitchers: when rested arms renew the annual struggle for controlled velocity. Today pitch counts and early outings are meticulously monitored. Pitching a complete game in spring training is unthinkable, even without an arthritic arm. On March 30, 1965, Koufax did just that. The next morning, his roommate, Tracewski, was at the sink shaving when Koufax walked in. “He says, ‘Look at this.’ And he had this elbow. The elbow was black. And it was swollen. There was muscles that were pulled and there was hemorrhaging. From the elbow to the armpit, it looked like a bruise. It was a black, angry hemorrhage. It was an angry arm, an angry elbow. And all he says is, ‘Roomie, look at this.’”
Quickly and quietly, Koufax returned to Los Angeles to see Kerlan. “All of a sudden, toward the end of the day, I’m looking around, thinking, Jeez, where’s Koufax at?” teammate John Kennedy said. “And somebody says, ‘Yeah, where is he?’ And everybody starts asking around. And then one of the trainers said, ‘We had to send him back to L.A. Something’s wrong with his arm.’ His arm was so swollen that it looked like if you poked it with your finger that the skin would burst. And everybody was saying, ‘Oh my God.’”
Kerlan told Koufax he’d be lucky to pitch once a week. Eventually, and irrevocably, he would lose full use of his arm. Koufax made Kerlan promise to tell him when that time was near. He told the doctor, “I’m trusting you to keep me going. I’m also going to trust you to say when you think I should quit.”
They mapped out a tentative schedule for 1965 that called for him to pitch every five days, which would have meant starting only thirty-four games instead of the expected forty-one. Pitching every fifth day wasn’t the norm. Nor was six innings of work considered a quality start. Quantity was quality. Koufax said the hell with it. He promised Kerlan he’d quit throwing between starts, no small concession for a man who routinely dragged Tracewski out of bed in the middle of the night in order to go throw. And Tracewski would get in his car at one end of Los Angeles and drive all the way across town so that Koufax could throw.
On April 2, Phil Collier broke the news in the San Diego Union: “Sore Arm May Signal End of Koufax Career.” Privately, Koufax told him, “I’m really worried—this might be the end.”
Palliatives and temporizing were all medicine had to offer: cortisone shots in the joint, Empirin with codeine for the pain (which he took every night and sometimes during the fifth inning), and Butazolidin (phenylbutazone alka), an anti-inflammatory drug prescribed for broken down thoroughbreds, so poisonous to living things that it was taken off the market in the mid-1970s. It had only one major side effect. “It killed a few people,” Jobe said.
Koufax didn’t think twice. Kerlan, who suffered from degenerative rheumatoid arthritis, was taking it. Their blood was tested weekly to determine the toxicity level. Doctors and patients alike were in the thrall of modern medicine, seduced by the notion of a magic little pill for every woe. Housewives dropped Valium, football players downed greenies, and baseball players ate Darvon between innings. The drug culture and its pharmacological cowboy mentality would eventually engender a holistic reformation. But Americans weren’t there yet. Koufax would recall years later: “I think the next two years, I never missed a start. I started a lot of games with two days’ rest and couldn’t believe it but the medical staff, the trainers, the doctors, they got me through it. They drained it. I lived on medication. Dr. Kerlan had arthritis at that time and he’d test them. He’d say, ‘Boy, this is working great but it’s killing my stomach.’ I said, ‘That’s okay. If my arm’s all right, I’ll take it.’”
Koufax rejoined the Dodgers in Washington, D.C., where they were scheduled to play an exhibition game against the Senators. Tossing a ball on the sidelines, he made headlines. “Sandy Plays Catch!” an ardent headline writer declared the next day. He was wondered at and wondered about. No one knew what to expect, least of all him. Improbably, he pitched three innings in his first outing, striking out five of the ten men he faced. Doug Camilli, his old catcher, was the last of them. He popped up. “Sore arm my eye,” Camilli yelled, as he trotted back to the Senators dugout. It was the prevailing opinion.
Koufax used an old pitcher’s salve called Capsolin, derived from red hot chili peppers grown in China. The active ingredient, capsaicin, works by depleting substance P, the brain’s pain messenger. It is the medical equivalent of hitting your head against a brick wall. Players called it the “atomic balm”: thick, gooey, relentless stuff which is no longer marketed in the United States. (Health food books provide homemade recipes.) Most pitchers diluted it with cold cream or Vaseline. Koufax used it straight, gobs of it. Nobe Kawano always made sure to wash his laundry separately. When Dodger trainers donated a used jersey to a local Little League team, the lucky kid who got Number 32 ran off the field screaming, “I’m on fire.” He wasn’t the only one. Lou Johnson wore one of Koufax’s sweatshirts one cold night in Pittsburgh thinking it would keep him warm in left field. First he began to sweat. Then his skin blistered. Then he threw up.
Capsolin was also a staple of hazing rituals. For Doug Harvey it was the price of admission to his high school varsity letterman’s club. “They handed me a jar of Capsolin and told me to put it on my balls,” he said. “Then they told me to sit on a bloc
k of ice. I took twenty showers. Nothing helped. The next morning, I went into the shower and peeled off the dead skin.”
If heat was Koufax’s salve, ice was his salvation. They didn’t have icepacks then. They just plunged your arm in a bucket of ice and waited for frostbite to set in. Koufax hated it. Trainers fashioned a rubber sleeve out of an inner tube, the height of medical technology, later donated to the Hall of Fame. Buhler and Anderson tracked his treatment with an egg timer.
Who could have predicted that by season’s end he would pitch 335 2?3 innings, and set a major league record by striking out 382 men (an average of 10.25 per game)? Not only did he never miss a turn, he pitched both the pennant-clinching game and the seventh game of the world series on two days’ rest.
Today stat geeks compile averages and percentages Babe Ruth never dreamed of. Delving into the numerological past, they seek wisdom buried in data, missionaries of what historian Jacques Barzun calls “the stat life.” Rany Jazayerli and the authors of Baseball Prospectus have created a sliding scale of Pitcher Abuse Points (PAP) that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Koufax abused his arm. That’s what pitchers did. And they took pride in it. In a 1961 game, Koufax threw 205 pitches. That’s nothing. Joe Hatten threw 211 pitches in a 1948 game. It was the ethos of the time. Playing hurt wasn’t a cliché. It was an economic necessity.