Sandy Koufax

by Jane Leavy

  Doctors were injecting steroids directly into the elbow joint. Once he had an adverse reaction. He was lying on the training table when infielder Jim Lefebvre walked in. “His arm, it was, like, twice the size,” Lefebvre said. “It was like a boil. I looked at him and I said, ‘Oh, my God, your season’s over.’ He looked at me and he goes, ‘No, no, Frenchie, it’s too late in the season. I won’t miss my start.’ And he didn’t.”

  It was a gut-wrenching, three-way pennant race between Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. On September 11, the Dodgers seized first place on the strength of Koufax’s fortieth—and last—career shutout. Five days later, he beat the Pirates 5–1 for his twenty-fourth win. The numbers were more impressive than his stuff. Noting his unusually low number of strikeouts (five), Bob Bailey said, “Compared with the way he usually throws, he had nothing.”

  Roberto Clemente thought otherwise. After the game, he sounded off to Phil Collier: “When my back hurts, they call me a goldbrick. Koufax says his elbow hurts and they make him national hero. Sore arm my foot. He threw as hard tonight as he ever has. He can’t have a sore elbow and throw like that. I know. I had bone chips in my elbow once and I had to throw underhand.

  “What does he think the National League is, a joke? Last year he wins twenty-six games and this year he wins twenty-four, and all I hear about is how much pain he has in his elbow. What does he want people to believe? That he could win fifty games a year if his elbow isn’t sore?”

  Clemente had made the incalculable error of underestimating Koufax, questioning not only his toughness but also, implicitly, his integrity. Koufax hated being doubted as much as he had loathed being misjudged early in his career. He rarely got angry. As former teammate Ed Palmquist said, “He was a gentleman, with all the social graces that ballplayers don’t have.”

  The next day behind the batting cage, there he was, on the dead run, going after Clemente, with Drysdale right behind him. “Wow,” Torborg said. “He must really be hurting.” When he faced the Cardinals on September 29, the Dodgers had a two-game lead with four games left to play. It was presumably his last start before the world series. The St. Louis fans gave him a standing ovation when he struck out Curt Flood in the fourth, becoming the first pitcher ever to strike out 300 men in each of three seasons. Flood’s home run in the seventh accounted for the Cardinals’ only run. When he doubled with two outs in the ninth, a sickening feeling permeated the Dodger dugout. Alston banished Barbieri from the bench after the rookie literally got sick to his stomach. “You just knew we were going down to the final game of the season,” Regan said.

  The Dodgers headed to Philadelphia for the last three games of the season. The second-place Pirates were playing the third-place Giants in Pittsburgh. All the Dodgers needed was one win, one Pittsburgh loss. It should have been easy. But fate had a more operatic denouement in mind. On Friday, the Dodgers and the Pirates lost. On Saturday, the Dodgers lost a game to rain, and the Pirates just plain lost. Suddenly, there was a pennant race again.

  When the final day of the regular season dawned, the Dodgers held a tenuous one-and-a-half-game lead over the Giants. It was decided that the rain-out would be played as part of a Sunday doubleheader but only if needed to determine the pennant; if it was necessary, Koufax would pitch. Not that anyone wanted that: He was supposed to open the world series against the Orioles three days later.

  It was baseball’s best version of improvisational theater: four teams in two disparate cities trading leads back and forth. Scoreboard watching was raised to high art. Everyone within radio frequency was tuned to events at either end of Pennsylvania. Veteran Dick Stuart wore headphones on the Dodger bench, updating the game in Pittsburgh. Sportswriters across town covering the Eagles game at Franklin Field watched the action with bifurcated vision—wondering whether to hurry over to Connie Mack Stadium. By the end of the afternoon, pro golfer Bob Rosburg was so nervous he forgot to sign his scorecard at the end of his round at the Canadian Open.

  Drysdale pitched “the lid-lifter” and lasted less than three innings. The Dodgers rallied to take a lead but so did the Pirates in Pittsburgh. The Dodgers clung to their one-run lead until the eighth inning. “Suddenly, the bases were drunk with no outs and Koufax leaped up out of the dugout and ran down to the bullpen,” said Doug Harvey, who was umpiring at first base. “Everybody in the ballpark saw him run down there. They knew what he was trying to do. They needed one ballgame. He was gonna relieve Drysdale but he couldn’t get there in time.”

  The Phillies tied the game on an error and took the lead on another one just as the scoreboard flashed the word: They were all tied up in the ninth in Pittsburgh. When the game ended, the Dodgers had a one-game lead over the Giants. They retired to the clubhouse to await their fate. “You could hear a pin drop,” Lefebvre said. “It was the most draining year I’ve ever had in my life ’cause you never had momentum. One day it was the Pirates, one day it was the Giants, one day it was us. It just kept switching back and forth. So finally we’re sitting there and Sandy stands up and says, ‘The hell with it.’”

  And he went out to warm up. Torborg caught him while tethered to a headset. Twice the Pirates loaded the bases. Twice they failed to score. In the umpires’ dressing room, Harvey ordered the clubhouse man to turn off the radio. “I told him, ‘Jim, just shut that off if you don’t mind.’ ’Cause I’m in my fifth year and believe me it’s a lot of pressure knowing that you’ve gotta go behind the plate and work the game.”

  In the Phillies’ locker room, Dick Groat decided not to shower and bit into a sandwich he never would have had if he thought he might be playing another game. By the time he finished it, Mauch had penciled him into the starting lineup. “I walked up the runway just in time to hear the announcer on the PA system in Philadelphia say that Willie McCovey had just hit a home run off Steve Blass in Forbes Field to win the game for the Giants,” Groat said. “And all of a sudden, the Dodgers have to win to clinch it.”

  The game took two hours and thirty-four minutes to play but a lifetime to develop. Looking into the Phillies’ dugout, Koufax saw Groat, now well fed and unshowered, who was at Forbes Field in 1954 when Koufax tried out for Branch Rickey; and at second base in 1962 when Koufax got jammed trying to hit left-handed and almost lost his index finger. Groat even fielded the infield single that resulted from it.

  He saw Bill White, who was batting against him in the spring of 1964 when the accumulated adhesions in his arm cut loose and his vulnerability was first publicly exposed. He saw Bobby Wine, Tony Taylor, and Richie Allen, all of whom were in the lineup when he held the Phillies hitless two months later. Opposing him was Bunning, whose path Koufax first crossed in Cincinnati when he was playing freshman basketball and Bunning was the opposing coach. In the Philadelphia bullpen was Ed Roebuck, an old teammate, who was at Lennie’s that night in 1961 when Kenny Myers helped Koufax find his release point with a dead cigar. And, starting in left field in his last major league game: Harvey Kuenn.

  In his own dugout, Koufax saw Drysdale, bat in hand, ready to pinch-hit if necessary; Al Ferrara, a graduate of Lafayette High in Brooklyn; and Wes Covington, who played winter ball with him in Puerto Rico in 1956. In the Dodger clubhouse, Don Newcombe was visiting with “Doc” Anderson and Bill Buhler. In the press box, New York Post columnist Larry Merchant, who once tried to recruit him to play football for Lafayette, had just arrived from Franklin Field. Catching his breath, Merchant thought, Practically the only games that matter for Koufax are ones like these.

  It was a year to the day since Koufax had clinched the 1965 pennant. Then, too, he was working on two days’ rest. But, in 1965, there was another game to be played in the season and another season left in his career. This time, he went to the mound knowing not just that he had to win but that if he didn’t it would be the last time he ever pitched.

  There comes a point when statistics are no longer a sufficient gauge of greatness, and Koufax had reached it. A more accurate measure was the way he
altered and enhanced memory, how teammates and spectators defined themselves in relation to him. So, a utility infielder like Nate Oliver, who never had the career he wanted or expected, would take solace in middle age from the nickname Koufax gave him and from the honed memory of fielding a sharply hit ground ball to save Koufax’s second no-hitter.

  So, an impressionable young baseball fan, Glenn Waggoner, would swear he saw Koufax carry a no-hitter into the sixth inning on a sultry summer night when baseball was still played outdoors in Houston. In his memory, mosquitoes swooned and fans collapsed but Koufax stayed in the game, soaking through a parade of woolen jerseys, until the first hit was allowed. In fact, Koufax won the game, an otherwise meaningless July contest, but it wasn’t close to being a no-hitter.

  Myth-making is a collaborative process, a collusion between recollection and fact. It requires the consensus that there is a larger truth to be told than the one found in a box score. The last game of the 1966 season has long since morphed into myth. Two umpires, Crawford and Harvey, insist Koufax struck out Allen with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth to win the game and the pennant. And that prior to the final swing Allen vowed “to air-condition” the stadium, telling Harvey, “It’s his ass or mine.”

  In fact, Allen struck out three times but not in the ninth inning. The first time, in the bottom of the first inning, there were two on and two out. Koufax would say later that the fastball that got Allen was the most essential pitch of the day, not just because of what could have happened but because of what it revealed about his own stuff. Heat was all he had to offer. “After one and one-third innings, Roseboro looked at me and said, ‘Sit back, kid,’” Harvey said. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Koufax said he can’t get his curve over. He’s gonna go with the heater, the fastball.’

  “That’s all he threw, the fastball, the rest of the game. He threw seven and two-thirds innings with nothing but a fastball. And they knew what was coming. And he still won the game for them, and the pennant. It was the greatest exhibition of baseball I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  What Harvey did not know was what transpired between innings. Pitching to Gary Sutherland in the fifth, Koufax felt something pop in his back. Retreating to the clubhouse, he called for more Capsolin from the trainers. Newcombe, who first introduced Koufax to the hot stuff, watched Buhler smear his arm, his back, his side. When he was done, Newcombe and Anderson tried to help Buhler pop that something in his back into place by pulling Koufax in opposite directions. “I pulled on his legs and they held his shoulder,” Newcombe said. “We tried to stretch him out. I remember he kept taking the pills. Every inning, he’d come in and holler for the trainer, ‘Give me some more.’”

  The Dodgers held a 6–0 lead going into the bottom of the ninth. Koufax had given up three infield hits and one solid double to White. But he still had to face Allen, Kuenn, and Taylor and he was spent. Allen was the only man to reach base in the 1964 no-hitter, on a 3-and-2 walk. This time, he reached on a gift by second baseman Lefebvre. Kuenn stepped to the plate for his 6,913th and last major league at-bat. The baseball gods had given him one last chance to atone for those two no-hit ninth-inning failures. Seeking redemption, Kuenn settled for a single.

  Next up: Taylor. He, too, singled, driving in the Phillies’ first run. White waited in the on-deck circle while Alston paid a visit to the mound, not to remove Koufax, as he had so often in the early years, but to remind him not to fall into the young pitcher’s trap, reaching back for too much. What else could he do? Nothing else was left.

  White admired Koufax as much as anyone in baseball admired adversaries in 1966. Later, they would become good friends. “Sandy, he didn’t cry and bitch about anything,” White said. “That’s why I liked him.”

  White hit an unsentimental double off the scoreboard, driving in two more runs. Dodgers 6, Phillies 3. And still no one out. Koufax struck out Bob Uecker for the first out. Mauch summoned Wine to pinch-hit, just as he had in the bottom of the ninth of the no-hitter in 1964. This time, Wine grounded out on a ball Maury Wills almost threw away. Out number two.

  Jackie Brandt approached the plate. “Koufax reared back and threw three balls by him,” Lefebvre said. “He had no chance. From somewhere, he got enough energy to blow him away. It reminded me of the intensity he had in the perfect game. Now, the game is over and the pennant won. I said, ‘Wow, man, where did that come from?’ He says, ‘I thought that was the tying run at the plate.’”

  In the hurly-burly of the locker room, Koufax pointed to the spot behind his left shoulder where the problem was while Covington doused him with champagne and shaving cream. “It doesn’t hurt when I drink champagne,” Koufax told the equally drenched reporters, pointedly.

  Umpires don’t ask for autographs. They collect memories, not memorabilia. In thirty-one years, Harvey made one exception to the rule. After he retired, he purchased an autographed picture of Sandy Koufax at an auction. “I have as much respect for Sandy Koufax as for any man I’ve ever met in my life,” Harvey said. “It was a privilege to work that game.”

  The anticlimactic world series opened two days later. Bookies made the depleted Dodgers 8–5 favorites to defeat the Baltimore Orioles. Los Angeles newspapers were already speculating about who would start game five—if the series went that far. The Orioles’ advance scout, Jim Russo, took three hours at a team meeting to describe the infallibility of Dodger pitching. Finally, manager Hank Bauer growled, “If these guys are that good, we got no chance. Meeting over.”

  Drysdale faltered in game one, outpitched by an unheralded reliever, Moe Drabowsky. In game two, Koufax was opposed by baby-faced Jim Palmer. It was his third start in eight days. Frank Robinson, who knew Koufax well from the National League, offered his new teammates this cogent advice: “If it starts at the belt, take it because it’s going to choke you.”

  Neither Palmer nor his young catcher, Andy Etchebarren, had ever seen anything like it. For four innings, Koufax was everything Robinson said. “The first time up, I’m hitting eighth, Palmer is in the on-deck circle,” Etchebarren said. “I take two strikes, swing at the third, the three hardest fastballs I’ve ever seen. When I was walking back, Jimmy Palmer looks at me and said, ‘You had no chance.’ You just say, ‘Shit and goddamn, I ain’t never seen anything come up here that quick.’”

  But by the second time through the batting order, it was apparent to Robinson that Koufax wasn’t the same pitcher he had known. “I couldn’t tell he was hurting,” Robinson said. “Sandy will never let on. But you knew he didn’t have the real good fastball. It was down in the low nineties, where before it was right about ninety-eight.”

  The game was easily summarized for the morning papers. “In the fifth inning, Willie Davis dropped two fly balls in center field,” Palmer reported. “And after the world knew he had trouble fielding, he threw a ball into the dugout trying to show he had a great arm.”

  No outfielder in world series history had ever made three errors in one inning before. Thanks to Davis, the Orioles scored three unearned runs, ending Koufax’s streak of twenty-two scoreless innings in world series play. When the third out was recorded, Davis headed for the end of the bench and so did Koufax. Teammates, misconstruing his purpose, stepped in his path. They should have known better. Koufax draped an arm over Davis’s shoulder and said, “Don’t let them get you down.”

  The next morning, the New York Post printed an exclusive interview with Koufax’s genetic father, Jack Braun, and the snapshots he had given the editors of a young boy in a shirt and tie, socks pulled high, trying to hit one over the fence in a distant New York playground. The story spoke of Braun’s ordeal as he watched his biological son betrayed by teammates on television. “He pitched his heart out and they do this to him.”

  The last hit Koufax surrendered was an opposite-field bloop single to Davey Johnson. “I only had three at-bats against him lifetime, and hit three hundred,” Johnson said. “I think I should be in the Hall of Fame.”
He told Koufax as much the next spring when they ran into each other at Dodgertown. “Sandy had retired but he was in uniform. I said, ‘Hey, Sandy, I guess you know who hit the last hit off you.’ He said, ‘Davey, that’s why I knew I was washed up.’”

  Decades later, riding a bus to an old-timers game, Boog Powell sat with Koufax and reminisced about that game. “He said, ‘If I had one thing to do over in my life, I’d love to pitch that game again.’ I’m sure he regretted it. I think what he was saying was, ‘You guys didn’t see the best I had.’ What he had was pretty good. He might have been hurtin’ but he was bringin’.”

  In Baltimore, Koufax warmed up on the sideline for a start he would never make, wincing with every delivery. Surrounded by photographers, he told Norm Sherry, his old catcher, “Get them away. If they’re here, I’m not throwing.”

  When Ed Linn, his coauthor, saw him in the locker room after the Orioles completed the unexpected four-game sweep, Koufax didn’t seem dejected. “When he came over, he put his arm around me and said, ‘Hey, collaborator, hey, pal, how come you left me to do the signings alone?’ I came back and said, ‘He’s through.’ There was a sense, ‘Okay, I climbed the mountain and now I can go on.’”

  On the flight back to Los Angeles, Koufax told Collier he was going to announce his retirement on the plane. “Shit, don’t do that,” Collier replied. “You’ll screw every A.M. paper in America. There’s no hurry. Wait a couple of weeks.”

  Koufax reluctantly agreed. A few minutes later, Drysdale came down the aisle. “Sandy turned to me and said, ‘He’d quit too if he could afford it,’” Collier remembered. “I thought, What a strange thing to say. But Sandy was at that point proud that he was able to get out at thirty, at the top.”