by Jane Leavy
In the spring of 1966 to say of a man he’d a played for nuthin’ was the ultimate accolade and the ultimate fiction. They played for money, just a lot less of it. The conceit of mercenary selflessness is a fin de siècle construct, a gauzy, revisionist mythology which allowed fans to think better of their heroes and owners to keep salaries down. When spring training camps opened that February, the minimum player salary was $7,000—one thousand dollars more than it was when Koufax signed with the Dodgers in 1955. Winning mattered. World series checks weren’t just latte money.
That spring, two events altered forever the balance of power in baseball. Jim Bunning and Robin Roberts put forth Marvin Miller, a seasoned trade unionist, as their candidate to lead the new Major League Baseball Players Association. And Koufax and Drysdale held out in tandem. In challenging Walter O’Malley, the power behind the commissioner’s throne, they were taking on not just the Dodgers but the Institution of Baseball. No one else could have done it; no one else had their standing or the irrefutable attendance figures to assert their value. The Dodgers acknowledged they drew an additional ten thousand fans every time Koufax started and three thousand when Drysdale pitched. They were the Big Two, K & D, 1 and 1A. “The dynamic duo,” Orel Hershiser called them, “Batman and Robin.”
Their closeness was one of proximity and shared experience rather than personality. They were amicable rather than intimate. They were two very different people who came from two very different worlds and, in the words of Drysdale’s second wife, Anne Meyers Drysdale, “they shared an unbelievable moment in time.” With Drysdale what you saw was what you got: Big D, California large and California handsome. Koufax was 3D—his essence elusive. A posed photo from the era, much circulated, showed them side by side on the mound, leaning in for the sign, gaze unwavering and intent. It underscored the impression that they were joined at the hip. In fact, everything about them was antithetical except their purpose. They were perfect foils, if not perfect friends. “They were so different,” she said. “That’s why they were so good together.”
They were teenagers when they met. Koufax came to the Dodgers first but Drysdale came to prominence earlier. By 1957, he was the ace. Koufax was still worrying about whether he would be sent down to the minor leagues. They spent that last winter as Brooklyn Dodgers in basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. They lived on base and visited Koufax’s parents in Brooklyn on weekend leave. It was there that Koufax taught Drysdale how to walk on snow; there that they heard the news about Roy Campanella’s accident on an icy stretch of Long Island macadam. Campy’s paralysis seemed to seal the Dodgers’ fate. There was nothing left for them in New York.
Drysdale took Koufax home to meet his parents in California, where his father, Scotty, now lives out his life “battling my eyes.” Scott remembers Koufax as a nice boy. Nobody said Don Drysdale was nice until he was dead.
He was the Ultimate Boy. “He was a marching band,” Scully said. “Where you saw Don, you saw at least a half dozen other players.” Drysdale tended bar at Club 53, the joint he named for his uniform number, and hung out at the racetrack with Bavasi. Koufax hung with utility guys and also-rans, players as marginal as he had once been—Doug Camilli, John Werhas, Dick Tracewski. They called themselves The Three Stooges, though it was hard to think of Koufax as a stooge. He’d been to college. “He was the kind of guy who’d have one drink, throw some money in the kitty, and go home,” pitcher Johnny Podres said.
Not one of the boys, reporters concluded.
“Don was so gregarious I think about him in the present tense,” Hershiser said. “A man’s man, larger than life. He understood his position in baseball and in public, and he capitalized on it but not in a slimy way. He treated the clubhouse kid and the president of the ball club the same.
“Sandy was somebody when you walked in a room and saw he was there, you approached Sandy with more of an aura of respect. It’s like the difference between walking onto public links as opposed to Augusta. You take your clubs out a little different.”
Always they were a driving force for each other. They tried to outdo each other and in so doing outdid everyone else. The Dodgers promoted and profited from their rivalry, playing them off against each other in salary negotiations. Ten years after Drysdale’s death Bavasi was still at it, saying, “I told him one hundred times, if I told him once, ‘You’re getting paid to pitch innings, Donald, he’s getting paid to break the records.’ Donald knew that. Drysdale had to battle for it. I think he was the one that was on Sandy’s coattails.”
No doubt, this is what Wills was getting at when he said, “The Dodgers didn’t do anything to help the relationship. It was not a competition between them. The Dodgers used Don against Sandy in contract negotiations. They lied to him.”
One night in the winter of 1965 after Koufax had gone in to discuss his 1966 contract with Bavasi, he met Drysdale for dinner. Drysdale knew immediately that something was bothering him. He reconstructed their conversation in his autobiography, Once a Bum, Always a Dodger:
“You walk in there and give them a figure that you want to earn,” Sandy said, “and they tell you, ‘How come you want that much when Drysdale only wants this much?’”
“I’ll be damned,” I replied. “I went in to talk to them yesterday for the first time and they told me the same story. Buzzie wondered how I could possibly want as much as I was asking when you were asking for only this.”
Koufax harbored ill feelings dating back to the “negotiations” for his 1964 contract when his alleged demand for $90,000 was leaked to Los Angeles newspapers. The only problem with the story was he hadn’t asked for $90,000. He had asked for $75,000 and said he would settle for $70,000. The story was calculated to make the Dodgers look good and generous and wise and make Koufax look bad. And he resented it. Drysdale was equally tired of Bavasi’s act. Between them they had won fifty-two regular season and world series games in 1965. It was Drysdale’s first wife, Ginger, who came up with the revolutionary proposal to join forces: “If Buzzie is going to compare the two of you, why don’t you just walk in there together?”
Whatever residual differences or jealousies there may have been stemming from the 1965 World Series, they were in complete solidarity on this. They went to see Bavasi and told him that neither would sign unless both were happy. What would make them happy was $1 million to be divided equally over the next three years, or $167,000 each for the next three seasons. In 1966 dollars, Drysdale said later, “It was like asking for the moon.”
Bavasi replied: “‘No way.’ I said, ‘Sandy, you know O’Malley, he works on a budget. He gives me x dollars and that’s it.’ He looked me right in the eye and he said, ‘Buzzie, budgets are made to be broken.’”
Everyone in baseball knew the unwritten law: There was a $100,000 salary ceiling. Only a few superstars, Musial, Mantle, Mays, DiMaggio, Williams, had reached that—and always under the table. The precedent of paying pitchers $100,000 was not one Bavasi wanted to set. Even more troubling to management, they were asking for a three-year, no-cut contract, unheard of at the time. But it wasn’t only the money that worried organized baseball.
Koufax was represented by an entertainment lawyer, J. William Hayes, in his business dealings outside of baseball. Drysdale had gone to him for advice when his own lawyer had a conflict of interest. Now Hayes began to advise them on their collective negotiations. This was, perhaps, the most dangerous precedent of all. “It was a radical step and it got more radical as it went,” Marvin Miller said.
When the Dodger plane left for Vero Beach on February 26, Koufax and Drysdale weren’t on it. A great public relations battle ensued, which Bavasi casts in a rosy retrospective hue. “I loved it, absolutely loved it,” he said. “We couldn’t buy those headlines.”
Bavasi Raps Stars Demands, Calls $500,000 Pacts Ridiculous
K & D Spurn Offer
Koufax-Drysdale Trade Looms, Bavasi Fed Up
K-D Contract War Has Mates Uneasy
Fr
iends Say Sandy Is Hopping Mad
K and D Making Other Plans
K and D Will Wow ’em in Show Biz
The name of the film was Warning Shot. The pitchers were photographed lounging on the set, their names inscribed on their director’s chairs. People noticed how much Koufax looked like David Janssen, the leading man. Drysdale was to play a TV commentator. Koufax was to play a detective sergeant. In the sports pages, they were cast as villains. O’Malley milked it for all it was worth, playing to the conservative Southern California audience, branding them as communists.
He was a master at playing the local sporting press, many of whom were condescendingly referred to by Eastern reporters as “house men.” It wasn’t hard to get them to play this tune. He would direct Bavasi to leave messages at Drysdale’s home, knowing the pitcher wasn’t there, and then when the call was returned, tell the press, “See, they’re getting anxious. They called me yesterday.”
Red Smith, the revered sports columnist who always referred to himself as “a working stiff,” presented a rare dissenting opinion:
Koufax and Drysdale defiled the name of the game by trying to bargain collectively and by bringing a lawyer to talk for them. Under the law, coal miners may bargain collectively but not ball players. Under the law, a rape-murderer must have legal counsel but not a ball player.
One night, in an attempt to evade the reportorial tumult, Koufax sought refuge at the newly opened resort at La Costa. Rita Wrighton and her friends were gathered around the piano singing show tunes over after-dinner drinks when Koufax arrived at midnight. They serenaded Koufax with an impromptu rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” He joined the sing-along, staying until 4:00 A.M., when Wrighton begged off, pleading an 8:00 A.M. tennis game.
The next morning, on her way to brunch, she saw a group of men—decidedly not in resort attire—huddled around Koufax. “He said, ‘Excuse me, I just spotted a friend of mine,’” Wrighton said. “He was glad to get away from the reporters and their notebooks.”
The alliance did not crack, even when management began leaking stories alleging dissension between K and D, trying to drive a wedge between them. That spring, Miller made his first tour of spring training camps, introducing himself to the players prior to the election that would make him executive director of the Players Association. Wherever he went, he was asked about Koufax and Drysdale.
As a trade unionist, Miller viewed their holdout as an argument for collective bargaining, telling players: “You can be the two best pitchers on the planet and still not get what’s coming to you if there’s only two of you.” He cited DiMaggio’s famous holdout. “Even if you were the number one player in the game, playing for the number one organization, they could tell you to take their offer or go fishing in San Francisco.”
The day after Miller visited Dodgertown, Bavasi spoke to the players, Jim Lefebvre recalled. “Bavasi said, ‘We can’t have this guy. This means strike. Strike means no money, no food to feed your family.’ We all looked at each other and said, ‘He’s in.’ Anybody Buzzie was that scared of had to be good for you.”
Still, the mood in Dodgertown was bleak. “It was a scary thing,” said Lefebvre. “Without them, where are we going to go?”
“Without them, we were naked,” said first baseman Wes Parker.
From the outset, Hayes told his clients that their gambit would work only if they were truly prepared to walk away. Koufax was. What had begun for him as an irresistible opportunity to tweak Dodger management had become a cause. Hadn’t his grandfather, Max Lichtenstein, an immigrant, walked away from a good job at Consolidated Edison? His first day of work at New York’s vast power company, Max watched the huge iron gates close behind the men on his shift. This was not why he came to America. “I came to get away from locked gates,” Max said. At the end of the shift, he walked back through those gates and never returned.
“The greatest hero in Sandy’s life was his grandfather,” Wilpon said. “And his grandfather was a socialist with high intellectual values and goals and ideals. And I think Sandy learned from that. Baseball players at that time were chattel. He didn’t think that was right. Not only because it was occurring to him, not only because there was money involved.
“Now, today, when you look back on that, everybody will tell you, ‘Oh, I don’t think that was right.’ But there was nobody who did anything about it. So with the background from Max, he felt he had to right the situation. He loved to challenge the system.”
Besides, he had already decided that the 1966 season would be his last. Drysdale had neither his independence nor his fragility. Koufax had no wife or children to provide for. Drysdale had no arthritis in his elbow. On March 25, four weeks into the holdout, Drysdale appeared on the front page of the Times sports section in uniform, working out at Pierce College in Woodland Hills. With publication of the photograph, their leverage disappeared. It was over. Koufax gave Drysdale the go-ahead to negotiate new deals for the two of them. They settled five days later.
The impasse was quickly resolved through an unlikely labor mediator, Chuck Connors, the onetime Dodger better known as The Rifleman. “Walter told me the highest I could go was two hundred twenty-five thousand dollars,” Bavasi said. “That’s all I could do. Well, I know that Sandy had to get the hundred twenty-five thousand dollars he wanted. I mean, there’s a young man who brings people to the ballpark. So I settled with Sandy for a hundred twenty-five thousand and with Donald for a hundred thousand. Now we get back to the office and I said to my secretary Edith, ‘I want you to make out a contract for a hundred twenty-five thousand dollars for Sandy and a hundred thousand for Donald.’
“And Sandy said, ‘I thought we’re supposed to get the same thing.’
“I said, ‘No, we agreed to this. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Edith,’ I said, ‘make the Drysdale contract for a hundred ten thousand dollars.’ Well, that’s ten thousand more than O’Malley told me I could spend. So they were both happy and they both signed. Now we won the pennant that year. Donald had a mediocre year but Sandy had the best year of his life. And Walter promised me an increase in salary if we won the pennant. So I got a nice note from Walter at the end of the season after we won the pennant: ‘Dear Buzzie, too bad you gave your bonus to Drysdale.’ I had to pay for Drysdale’s ten thousand.”
When the signing was announced aboard the team plane en route to the West Coast, everyone cheered. Bavasi joked that he was left holding a bloody cashbox.
The pitchers joined the team in Arizona for the last weekend of exhibition games. In his first appearance, Koufax went six innings without giving up a hit. The next day, Drysdale pitched six scoreless innings and was booed.
In the history of baseball’s labor revolution, this early experiment in sweaty solidarity is generally given short shrift. It pales next to Curt Flood’s landmark refusal in 1969 to accept a trade from St. Louis to Philadelphia. The 1975 decision by arbitrator Peter Seitz liberating Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally from their contracts was baseball’s Emancipation Proclamation. But revolutions begin with baby steps. When Koufax and Drysdale withheld their services together, they made it possible for Flood to run. “Baseball players today owe a lot to Curt Flood and Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally,” former Dodger Don Sutton said. “But Flood, Messersmith, and McNally owed a lot to Koufax and Drysdale. Because they were the first guys who really took a stand. This was the first challenge to the structure of baseball.”
The establishment view is that O’Malley reeled them in like a couple of shiny trout swimming upstream. He played them, reporters said. They didn’t get the money they asked for; therefore, they caved. In fact, the dollars they asked for and the dollars they received were not nearly as important as the demand to be reckoned with. They had lured O’Malley into turbulent waters, the vast undercurrent of players’ rights.
Peter O’Malley, who inherited the team from his father, says the prospect of player agents didn’t daunt the old man. By then, O’Malley was wise
in the ways of Hollywood. Everybody had an agent there. But they didn’t have agents in Kansas City and St. Louis and other so-called major league towns where the men who ran baseball were accustomed to running deals down the throats of players whose best arguments for themselves were never verbal. The idea that crotch-scratching, tobacco-chewing ballplayers, proud wielders of the tools of ignorance, would be on equal footing was untenable, which is why Bavasi still denies having negotiated with Hayes. Talked to him once, maybe. Negotiated, never.
In these “discussions,” Hayes never directly challenged the Reserve Clause. But, he had instructed a young lawyer working in his office to research the topic. Richard Hume discovered a 1944 case brought on behalf of the actress Olivia de Havilland, against Warner Brothers Pictures, in which she argued that any personal services contract binding her to the studio for longer than seven years was illegal. The California Appellate Court agreed, ruling:
A contract to render personal service, other than a contract of apprenticeship…cannot be enforced against the employee beyond the term of seven years from the commencement of service under it.
This case was cited three years later, when basketball player Rick Barry challenged the validity of his contract with the San Francisco Warriors. The law went straight to the heart of free agency. Hume says O’Malley became aware of this potentially explosive legal doctrine through his Hollywood friend Mervyn LeRoy. “I’ll never know whether Buzzie folded because of the work we did or because he was missing his two best pitchers,” Hume said. “But we had the case law.”
The full impact of the Great Holdout would not be realized for another decade. In 1976, after Seitz had sanctioned free agency, Miller began the arduous process of negotiating the players’ new rights. Time and again, perhaps even fifty times, Miller says, management cited Koufax and Drysdale as their worst nightmare, invoking the plaintive words of Braves manager Bobby Bragan: “What if my entire infield holds out?”