Sandy Koufax

by Jane Leavy

  Choosing not to work on Yom Kippur was not a difficult decision. It’s what Jews do. His roommate, Tracewski, doesn’t remember him agonizing over it. “It was a given with him.” So, you pitch a day late. Big schmeer. And, as Osteen said, “It wasn’t a real bad choice having Drysdale.”

  Drysdale started in his place and got hammered. The score was 7–1 when Alston came to the mound to relieve him. “Hey, skip, bet you wish I was Jewish today, too,” Drysdale said. For Jews, the loss was a win. If Big D could joke about being one of the Chosen People, that was already something, a tacit acknowledgment of their acceptance into the mainstream. Shtetl, farewell.

  Koufax started and lost game two. The flight back to Los Angeles was difficult, especially for Osteen, who was scheduled to start game three. He sat on the aisle and every coach and player walking by made sure to touch his left shoulder. With each reassuring pat and each pat rejoinder—“You’ll get ’em!”—his shoulder got tighter.

  Humor is a catalytic element in the mysterious compound known as clubhouse chemistry. Koufax and Drysdale were always good for that. “It’s almost like we never laughed in wintertime,” is how Dick Tracewski remembers it.

  Somewhere over the continental divide, on the funereal flight from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, “Don looks at Sandy and goes, ‘Well, we sure got ourselves in a hell of a mess, didn’t we?’” Jim Lefebvre said. “And they started laughing.”

  The Dodgers won three straight in Los Angeles—Osteen, Drysdale, and Koufax outdid themselves and each other. In the final home game of the series, Koufax shut out the Twins, 7–0. After the game, Koufax cheerfully told Scully, “I feel like I’m a hundred years old.”

  The Dodgers needed only one more win but they needed to go back to Minnesota to get it. They were confident. Lou Johnson packed enough clothes for a one-day business trip. The Dodgers checked out of the team hotel the morning before game six was played. Osteen lost, forcing management to scramble for rooms and Alston to make a difficult decision. Parker, the first baseman, went into the bathroom and cried. Alston summoned his coaches—Preston Gomez, Danny Ozark, Lefty Phillips—to a gloomy tribunal. Drysdale was the logical choice to pitch game seven. It was his turn in the rotation. He would be pitching on a full three days’ rest; Koufax on two.

  The players were showering; no one had popped a beer. All three coaches put their heads between their knees when Alston broached the question. Ozark recalled the scene. “‘Jeez,’ Lefty Phillips says, ‘Koufax does real well against them, maybe he can go.’ Alston says, ‘Who’s gonna ask him?’ Everyone got laryngitis. Me, the big dumb Polack says, ‘I’ll do it.’ I find out later on that there were differences between him and Alston. They may have been going back to ’57. I don’t think he could overlook what happened. It was his career. They held him back.”

  His teammates knew how he felt. “He felt he always had something to prove with Walter Alston,” Ron Perranoski said. “He wasn’t used when he was young and when he was used he wasn’t trusted. He always had this thing in the back of his mind about the way he was treated, that he didn’t get a chance. He knew what he was made of, what he was capable of.”

  Those feelings endured. In 1985, thirty years after his rookie season, twenty years after his world series triumph, there was a celebration in Vero Beach. “Buzzie was there and they were telling stories and Buzzie’s laughing,” Tom Villante recalled. “And then Sandy starts with Buzzie about why the hell didn’t Alston pitch me. Buzzie was giving him some double talk but Sandy was getting mad all over again. I’ll never forget it. Sandy was transformed into this nineteen-year-old kid again, puzzled why the hell Alston didn’t pitch him.”

  When Ozark approached him at his locker at Metropolitan Stadium on the eve of the seventh game of the 1965 World Series, Koufax told him, “I’m okay for tomorrow.” It would be his third start in eight days. “He didn’t want to be known as a person who couldn’t have the strength and the ability to take the ball on two days’ rest,” Wilpon said. He did so eight times in his career, winning six; three were complete-game wins with a combined total of thirty-five strikeouts. He never lasted less than seven innings. How much, if at all, this represented for him a refutation of stereotype is unknowable. How much it represented a retort to early doubters is easier to guess. But it spoke volumes to the Jewish community.

  Listening at home in St. Louis to radio station KMOX, Irvin Muchnick and his father heard Marty Marion, the former Cardinal shortstop, say he’d choose Drysdale, the rested pitcher, over Koufax as the seventh-game starter. “Dad immediately declared that Marion, a hick from South Carolina, was an anti-Semite,” Muchnick recalled nearly four decades later.

  Alston told Mel Durslag, the Los Angeles writer, it was the hardest decision he ever made as a manager. Drysdale subsequently made it easier by volunteering to go to the bullpen. “He was worried about Drysdale’s feelings and afraid of saying something anti-Semitic,” Durslag recalled. “He was an uptight guy, not a loose guy. People intimated—he was a farmer from the middle of Ohio—that he might have been anti-Semitic. Maybe he felt if he didn’t give it to Koufax, he’d look anti-Semitic.”

  The heart of bias is as intangible as it is corrosive. When he was interviewed by Charley Steiner for ESPN’s Sports Century series, Koufax was asked, off camera, whether he believed anti-Semitism played a part in the way he was used early in his career. “I don’t even want to think about that,” Koufax replied. It violates his code of honor to argue with the dead or the past. He has never addressed the issue publicly and he won’t. But as Steiner, now the voice of the Yankees, says, “When he says he hasn’t thought about something, you know he’s thought about it a lot.”

  Others have, too. Eddie Liberatore, the late Dodger scout, said before he died in 2001, “One story I don’t like to tell, there were certain guys in the organization who referred to him as ‘a gutless Jew’ because he was wild. When he got control and began to be a big winner, he was probably the most idolized pitcher of this time. They all jumped on his bandwagon, these same critics.”

  Among his black teammates a degree of bias was presumed. Like Ozark, they noticed who pitched on Opening Day, whose face appeared on yearbooks and press guides and newspapers. “Don was blond and blue-eyed and more marketable as far as being the Dodger image,” Wills said. “Sandy was second fiddle. All the black players felt that. Don was the poster boy: it was always Don and Sandy. We knew it was Sandy and Don.”

  Rumors started flying on the bus on the way back to the hotel. Coaches, rookies, other members of the pitching staff all weighed in. Opinion was unanimous. “You don’t have to ask our ball club, ‘Who do you want to see pitch?’” said Gomez. “The whole world is going to say, ‘Give the ball to the Jew.’”

  Wills: “We might not have gone on the field if he hadn’t.”

  Koufax and Drysdale arrived at the ballpark the next morning unshaved—a signal that neither knew the skipper’s decision. In fact, it was a ruse. Koufax knew but wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, not even his roommate, Trixie. Alston announced his decision at a team meeting before the game, explaining with soothing if impersonal logic why he had chosen Koufax. “He says, ‘We’re going to start the left-hander,’” Tracewski remembered. “‘After that we have Drysdale in the bullpen and if we need it we’ll finish off with Perranoski. And if that’s not good enough, we are in trouble.’

  “It was a very quiet meeting and it was a very quick meeting and Sandy said, ‘He called me the left-hander,’” Tracewski said. “He felt he should have called him by his name.”

  Watching the videotape of the seventh game of the 1965 World Series is like looking at a piece of American folk art. There is an innocence about the broadcast as primitive as the production values. There were marching bands and decorous cheerleaders, skinny ties and vendors selling straw boaters to polite Minnesota fans. “Not a smokestack crowd,” as infielder Frank Quilici described them. “Nice.” The Twins’ front office sat Dodger wives behind home plate.
In Los Angeles, the Twins’ wives were given seats way out in right field. Between innings, go-go dancers did a decorous frug; and Gillette hawked a new super stainless-steel blade with Miracle Edges to a clean-shaven nation. Harry Coyle, the director, had only a couple of cameras to work with, and a batboy who kept wandering into the frame. The narration is uncluttered and understated, so quiet you can hear the sound of an airplane buzzing the outfield. On the pregame show, Vin Scully and Ray Scott talked about the pitching matchup: Sandy Koufax and Jim Kaat for the third time, both on two days’ rest. No one mentioned Yom Kippur. Today, ESPN would be doing man-on-the-street interviews at the Wailing Wall.

  The broadcast is a staple of Classic Sports television. Sam Mele, the Twins’ manager, has seen it nine, maybe ten times. “Lost every goddamn game,” he says. He, too, remembers the quiet. “They normally weren’t that quiet,” Mele said. “I think everybody could sense—even my bench and me—that it’s Koufax out there. You know what I mean? You can’t get too excited because this guy’s going to knock the jubilance out of you, you know?”

  That morning a thunderstorm of biblical proportions inundated the Twin Cities. Helicopters were brought in to dry the field. By game time, the skies had cleared. Temperatures were in the fifties. Osteen, who had lost game six, went down to the bullpen to see if he could help out, standing in an imaginary batter’s box so that Koufax would have someone to throw to. Osteen had never seen his curve from that vantage point before. He remembers thinking, So that’s why they can’t hit it.

  As they walked in from the bullpen, Koufax stopped to say hello to Joe Nossek, the Twins’ rookie outfielder, playing in his first world series. Nossek thought, “Cloud number nine just got a little more elevated.” Neither Nossek nor Osteen had any intimation of how much of himself Koufax had left in the bullpen. Though they might have gotten a scent of it, as Kaat had before game one, when the opposing pitchers met on the field for the ritual pregame handshake. Kaat’s eyes began to water, then tear, then burn. Kaat fled as soon as baseball etiquette allowed, driven away by the smell of Capsolin. “It was like walking into a steam room with camphor,” he said.

  Koufax was pitching on fumes. When he walked two batters in the first inning, Drysdale got up in the bullpen. He was a two-pitch pitcher without a second pitch. Roseboro kept calling for the curve; Koufax kept shaking him off. Finally, Roseboro went to the mound for a conversation. For the first time, Koufax acknowledged how bad his elbow was. “He said, ‘Rosie, my arm’s not right. My arm’s sore.’ I said, ‘What’ll we do, kid?’ He said, ‘Fuck it, we’ll blow ’em away.’”

  The game was scoreless when Johnson came to bat in the fourth inning. He had called his mother before the game, vowing, “I’m going to do something today, Ma. I told Sandy I was gonna get him a run.”

  He kept his promise, hitting Kaat’s fastball long and deep to left field. It was curving foul when the foul pole got in its way. Home run! Johnson applauded as he rounded the bases. The rest of the stadium was so quiet Tracewski could hear Johnson’s footsteps as he came around third. “So quiet,” Johnson said, “you could hear a cat pissing on cotton.”

  The crowd remained nicely catatonic until the bottom of the fifth. Quilici, the Twins’ second baseman, doubled, and the next batter walked. With one out, Zoilo Versailles hit a ball hard down the third base line. It was past Junior Gilliam when he realized it was in his glove. Somehow he beat Quilici to the bag. In the press box, the game was officially declared over.

  The afternoon sun waned. Koufax pitched from the shadows. His royal blue sweatshirt appeared navy; his beard darkened inning by inning. His mouth hung open after every pitch. Drysdale got up in the bullpen again. Scully wondered aloud how far a man could go with only one pitch. “Everybody sat there with their mouths open,” Ozark said. “He pitched like it was going to be his last breath.”

  In the ninth inning, the 360th of his season, Koufax faced the heart of the Minnesota order: Tony Oliva, Harmon Killebrew, Earl Battey, and Bob Allison, a two-time batting champion, a six-time home-run leader, a four-time All-Star, and a onetime Rookie of the Year. With one out, Killebrew singled sharply to left, the Twins’ third hit of the game. Battey came to the plate. One swing, he thought, and I could be the world series MVP! By the time the words formed a sentence in his brain, the umpire had signaled, “Strike three.”

  Up to the plate strode Allison, a formidable slugger whose two-run home run off Osteen had forced the seventh game. He fouled off the first pitch and looked at two others for balls and then swung at the next. “It’s two and two,” announcer Ray Scott informed the television audience. “Koufax is reaching back. Every time he’s had to reach back, he’s found what he needed.”

  Killebrew watched from first base as Allison swung through strike three for the final out of the series. “I told Bob, ‘If you’d have swung at the ball as hard as you swung at the ground after you struck out, you might have hit it.’”

  The orderly Minnesota fans exited Metropolitan Stadium, taking all the air with them. The scoreboard congratulated them for being the best fans in the world. The Dodgers were almost as low-key. Parker, the young first baseman, wasn’t sure what to do with himself. “I’d been dreaming about this my whole life. I was ready to go nuts. I’m running toward the mound and there’s no noise. I’m wondering if someone called time. But no, the Minnesota fans were filing out. I looked at Sandy. Sandy wasn’t doing anything. He didn’t pump a fist or jump in the air. He was just walking toward Roseboro.”

  It was his second shutout in four days, his twenty-ninth complete game of the season. The locker room was joyously subdued, partly because a phalanx of sportswriters had gotten stuck between floors in the press elevator and partly because everyone was so drained. Scully wrapped an arm protectively around Koufax, the bright light of live television highlighting his fatigue. “Here’s the fella who gave the Dodgers the championship. Sandy, in Los Angeles, when you pitched a seven-nothing shutout, you were quoted as saying, ‘I feel like I’m a hundred years old.’ So today, Sandy, how do you feel?”

  Koufax was too tired to do anything but smile and tell the truth. Viewers at home saw a grin so wide his dimples threatened to implode. “Well, Vinnie, I feel like I’m a hundred and one. I’m just glad it’s over and I don’t have to do this again for four whole months.”

  Time devoted a page in its next issue to baseball, a cut-and-paste story cobbled together from series coverage, recycled quotes, and McWhirter’s unused file. The tone was decidedly “cool”—grudgingly appreciative at best. It got right to the point: “Just because a man does his job better than anybody else doesn’t mean that he has to take it seriously—or even like it.”

  And it continued:

  Alone among ballplayers, Koufax is an anti-athlete who suffers so little from pride that he does not even possess a photograph of himself. TV and radio interviewers have learned to be careful with personal questions—or risk a string of billingsgate designed to ruin their tapes….

  To his teammates, even to his few close friends, Koufax’s aloofness is often downright annoying. “Imagine,” says Dodger catcher John Roseboro, “being good-looking, well-off, single—and still be so cool. I know guys who would be raising all kinds of hell on those stakes.” Dodger vice president Fresco Thompson considers him a heretic. “I don’t think he likes baseball,” mutters Thompson. “What kind of a line is he drawing anyway—between himself and the world, between himself and the team?”

  In the fall of 1965, you’d have to have been decidedly square to miss Roseboro’s meaning. Cool as in hip. What had been intended as a compliment was construed as evidence of a “taciturn” personality. What Koufax had said to Scully in a moment of utter depletion was interpreted as further evidence of his dislike for baseball. In the great American fiction known as the World of Sports, Our Hero is a selfless, square-jawed exemplar of uncommon grace and modesty, who always plays for the Love of the Game, no matter how much he earns. Thus, to say he doesn’t love it is
to deny him the status of Our Hero. To label Koufax as an “anti-athlete” was to damn him forever for being different. It is what author Roger Kahn calls “a genteel form of anti-Semitism.”

  After the series, Ed Linn, newly hired as the ghostwriter for Koufax’s proposed autobiography, went to Hawaii to meet him. Koufax was staying by himself on the beach on a remote part of the Big Island. Bill Hayes, Koufax’s lawyer and business manager, gave Linn explicit directions: “You will pass two dirt roads very close together, a little variety store in between. You take the second dirt road; if you pass it and miss it, you’ll never find it. Go to the end. There will be a link fence. There’s a door that will be open. Sandy’s there. He will be in a beach house.”

  “I found it without any difficulty. I get to this fence. There’s no open door. There’s a chain lock. There’s a half dozen workmen. I say, ‘Have you seen Sandy Koufax?’

  “One said, ‘You talking about Sandy Koufax, the ballplayer? Boy, are you lost. He’s three thousand miles away.’ Just at that moment, out of this little shack comes Koufax in bathing trunks. I said to the guy, ‘No, he’s maybe fifty yards that way.’”

  After Linn climbed the fence and they began to talk, he learned how hurtful the Time magazine story was, particularly the perception of aloofness for a man who was a consummate team player. So when he sat down to write, Linn composed an impassioned fourteen-page protest, in Koufax’s voice, aimed at the editors of Time magazine and all other reductionist thinkers.

  I have nothing against myths. But there is one myth that has been building through the years that I would just as soon bury without any particular honors: the myth of Sandy Koufax, the anti-athlete. The way this fantasy goes, I am really a sort of dreamy intellectual who was lured out of college by a bonus in the flush of my youth and have forever after regretted—and even resented—the life of fame and fortune that has been forced upon me.