Sandy Koufax

by Jane Leavy

  He led a contingent of players—he remembers Roseboro, Gilliam, and Willie Davis being with him—to see Peter O’Malley, who was running Dodgertown for his father. “We went to Peter and said, ‘We gotta change this.’ We walked in and said, ‘This is what we want to do.’”

  O’Malley immediately ordered the bathroom facilities desegregated. He kept a photograph of the groundskeeper taking down the “White Women” and “White Men” signs and “putting just ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ up instead.” Integrating the grandstand took a while longer. When the players went back to the field the next day, the black folks were still sitting deep in the right-field corner on the concrete stands that had always been set aside for them. Davis and his teammates walked across the lush green grass to speak with them. “We said, ‘We want you to go behind home plate. You can sit anywhere you want. You don’t have to sit here anymore.’ They said, ‘No, no, no.’”

  So the players took them by the hand and led them out of the stands. “Directing traffic until they got used to it,” Davis said.

  Tommy Davis would go on to become the National League batting champion in 1962 and 1963. But it’s the walk across the grass that he recalls when he remembers when.

  Perhaps, the mood of rebellion was inspired by the giddy optimism that annually accompanied the opening of spring training. The day pitchers and catchers reported was still an occasion observed by tomboys who wore their Mary Janes to school in celebration. On the day Dodger camp officially opened in 1961, cameras from the News of the Day swept the manicured playing fields and found Koufax tossing the ball around with his mates. “Baseball’s bustin’ out all over!” a cheerful newsreel voice intoned. “The popular Sandy Koufax, still a potentially great mounds man, pitches one to shortstop Maury Wills.” The announcer sounded surprised to see him.

  Koufax returned to baseball with new priorities. He had spent the winter reacquainting himself with the real world through his electronics business. He hated selling. He ended up telling customers, “You don’t want this shit. Let’s go have lunch.” He also began to look inward. Maybe he hadn’t done all he could. He began to take responsibility for his fitful career. “Growing up, it’s called,” he would tell friends and reporters. “Baseball didn’t even become important to me until two or three years after I started to play. I didn’t work hard enough. I didn’t do what I should have done.”

  Decades later, he elaborated on the theme, telling his friend Kevin Kennedy, “That winter was when I really started working out. I started running more. I decided I was really going to find out how good I can be.”

  When he arrived at Dodgertown, the equipment he had tossed into the garbage at the end of the 1960 season was waiting for him at his locker. “I thought you might want these,” Kawano said.

  Deliverance was at hand. People had been telling him the same thing in different ways for years. Quit throwing so hard. You gotta sacrifice speed for accuracy. Don Newcombe used a military analogy. “See, when you throw a baseball, it’s like firing a pistol. If you go, ‘bang, bang, bang, bang,’ just fire shots off, you’re not gonna hit a thing. But if you squeeze the shots off you might hit what you’re aiming at.”

  One night, over beers at Lennie’s, Kenny Myers, the old scout, was talking with Norm Sherry and Ed Roebuck. Myers was a baseball man, as invaluable as he was invisible. “I remember Kenny was smoking one of those cigars,” Roebuck said. “That bar was the pits but it was right by the batting cage so you didn’t have to go too far. He took out his cigar and marked a spot on the wall. He said, ‘Sandy, take an imaginary baseball and try to hit that spot.’ So when Sandy got up to take his windup, Kenny said, ‘Wait, Sandy, you can’t even see that spot. You’re taking your whole body back and your head is going way above the spot. Why not try taking your hands back and keep your head level and naturally correct the trajectory. Your release point will become lower.’”

  In Sherry’s recollection, the conversation continued for another half an hour in the men’s room. He was scheduled to catch Koufax the next day in a B game against the Minnesota Twins in Orlando. None of the coaches or the team brass was making the trip. Only three pitchers were going. One of them, Ed Palmquist, known as Wally Weird, was sitting on the steps of the barracks the next morning nursing a hangover when the plane took off. “Oh my God,” he said. “There goes the Dodger plane.”

  The Dodgers fined him twenty-five dollars. They should have given him a lifetime annuity. In his absence, Gil Hodges, the designated manager, told Koufax he would have to pitch at least seven innings. Then Hodges got beaned in batting practice and had to go to the hospital for X rays, taking trainer Bill Buhler with him. There was no one to give Koufax his customary pregame rubdown. The ever-accommodating Kawano gave him a special Oriental massage with Joy Oil.

  Norm Sherry is a mild man, diminutive by today’s bulked-up athletic standards. He looks more like your uncle in the rag trade than the man Drysdale called “Catcher Face.” “You have a face like a catcher,” Drysdale always said. And hands too. His features are sun-worn and freckled, his fingers as gnarled as the roots of a eucalyptus tree.

  On the plane ride to Orlando, Koufax told him he wanted to experiment with his change-up. Sherry had a more modest proposal: Get the ball over the plate. “I started out by calling a curveball on the first pitch. It was a ball. Then I came back with another curveball: a ball. I called for a change-up and it was a ball. I called for a fastball on three and oh. It was high, ball four.”

  Next batter. “Now we start out with a change-up, then a curve. Sandy’s frustrated—he hasn’t thrown a strike. So we go fastball, fastball, and he walks the guy. We start the next guy out with a curveball and then another curveball. Koufax is mad. He’s shaking me off. He’s throwing fastballs, higher and higher. The last two got up there good. He walks the guy. Now the bases are loaded. Nobody out. I went to the mound. I said, ‘Sandy, we only got nine guys. You’ve got to throw the ball over the plate or we’ll be here all day.’”

  In his autobiography, Koufax remembers Sherry telling him to “take the grunt out of the fastball.” In truth, there was less poetry and more vehemence to it. “What I actually said was ‘Take something off the ball and let ’em hit it. Nobody’s going to swing the way you’re throwing now.’ I went back behind the plate. He wound up like, ‘Here, hit it’ and strikes out the side. It was like, ‘I’ll show you, you smart-ass.’

  “We went back to the dugout, I said, ‘Sandy, I got to tell you something. I’m not blowing smoke up your rear end. But you just now threw harder trying not to than you did when you were trying to.’”

  At the end of the requisite seven innings, Koufax had struck out eight and walked five without allowing a hit. The change in him was immediate and apparent to Kawano. “I could tell when he came in,” Kawano said. “It was the first time he really enjoyed himself playing. We joked about it later—it was the Oriental rubdown that did it. You could see how elated he was. My God, a no-hitter!”

  That night, Koufax broke curfew, returning late from a pizza run to Port St. Lucie with Norm’s brother, Larry. Stan Williams, Koufax’s roommate, also was late getting in. Unfortunately, their room was directly across the hall from manager Walter Alston’s. “You could not put your foot on one part of the barracks without it creaking two hundred yards away,” Williams said. “Now Walter kept his wife there with him when she was in town. She had left that particular day and so I guess Walter decided he was going to keep an ear open that night for any creaks. I came in, not inebriated but a little tipsy. I learned to walk on the very edge of the floor by the wall because it didn’t creak quite as much there.

  “I walked in, two o’clockish, and the sitting room light was on. I said, ‘Oh, dear old Sandy, he left the light on for me so I’d know that he left the door unlocked.’ So I took the door and went to open it and it was locked. And there was a thump and the minute I made the thump, I heard a rustling and it’s Walter getting out of bed across the hall. So I immediately tore int
o my pocket, got my key out, let myself in, and locked the door so he couldn’t follow me. Of course, I had my shoes off already. I went into the bedroom, put my shoes under the bed, and just as I sat down on the bed there was banging on the bedroom door.

  “Well, I had a reputation of being a real sleeper. So I let him pound on the door for a while. But as he’s pounding, I’m undressing and throwing my clothes under the bed. And finally I said, ‘God, who is this?’ He said, ‘It’s Walter, open the door.’

  “I says, ‘Who?’

  “He says, ‘Alston. Open the damn door.’

  “And I said, ‘Oh, just a minute, skip.’ I tore the blankets back like I’d been sleeping and then I went and opened the door. I covered my face like I was very sleepy so Walter couldn’t smell the beer on my breath. And I said, ‘Yeah, Walt, what is it?’

  “He said, ‘Who just came in?’

  “I said, ‘I don’t know, Walter, I’ve been sleeping. I’ve got a ballgame I got to pitch at eight A.M. over at Field Seven.’

  “He says, ‘Who’s your roomie?’

  “I said, ‘Sandy.’ And I pointed to Sandy’s bed, and he wasn’t in it.

  “And he says, ‘Where is he?’

  “I said, ‘I guess he’s in the sitting room. The light’s on.’

  “So he pushed me out of the way and walked back in there and said, ‘He’s not in there. You tell him when he comes in to go over to my room and knock on the door.’

  “I said, ‘Well, Walt, I probably won’t hear him. I sleep awfully sound.’

  “And he says, ‘Then you tell him I want to see him in the morning.’

  “So my heart was pounding a mile a minute but I figured I must have pulled it over on him because he went across the hall and pounded on Roseboro and Gilliam’s door asking, ‘Who just came in?’

  “Anyway, I lay back down in the bed and finally went to sleep. Just about the time I went to sleep, all hell breaks loose. Boy, there was all kinds of noise. What had happened is that Sandy came creeping up the stairs with his shoes in his hand just the same as I did. He got to the sitting room and said, ‘Good old Stan, he left the light on for me.’

  “So he thought the door was open. Well, he grabbed the door and started to push on it and it was locked because I locked it so Walter wouldn’t follow me in. So Sandy hits the thing and the minute he hit it, Alston’s out of his room like a shot. Now Sandy’s plastered up against the door not knowing what to do and Alston starts after him. But just as he starts after him, he looks down to the other end of the corridor and here’s Larry Sherry walking around the corner in his shorts, carrying his clothes, and teetering all over the place. So Alston forgets all about Sandy and tears after Larry. Larry sees him coming and he runs into his room and locks the door. Alston’s yelling, ‘Come out of there and fight me. I’ll whip your so-and-so butt.’ And Larry’s afraid to open the door because Alston’s so mad.”

  Alston pounded on the door so long and so hard, he broke his world series ring. The characteristic monotony of the next morning’s bus trip was interrupted by Koufax’s cheerful inquiry: “Hey, Larry, had your door appraised for diamonds yet?”

  Throwing a baseball sixty feet six inches with exactitude and intent is a kinetic event with intangible dimensions. Try too hard and you overthrow. Tighten your grip and you lose control, infusing tension in the ball’s trajectory. Now, it’s easy to tell young pitchers he sees tossing the ball, “Just pitch like that.” But it’s hard to relax when you’re hanging on to each opportunity for dear life. The changes Koufax made in his delivery were as subtle as they were overpowering. As his friend Dave Wallace, the pitching guru, puts it: “The mechanics of the delivery is such a precision thing, it’s almost Zen-like. When you have it, you know it.”

  In the privacy of the Dodger clubhouse, Norm Sherry, aka “Catcher Face,” was also known as “the Jolly Jew.” His brother, Larry, was “the Rude Jew.” Koufax was on his way to becoming “Super Jew.” Why was he able to listen to Norm when so many others had failed to get through? “Catcher Face” grinned, his features crinkling like old leather. “Landsman, eh?”

  Now when they went to the string area to work, Sherry would cover home plate with dirt. “Take my finger and make a line so there’s a line of white, right?” Sherry said. “The rest is nothing, dark. Just the width of a finger and he’d put it right on the money! He realized how good he could be. I don’t know what he did the rest of the year, but by ’62, you couldn’t hit him.”

  Finally, he was pitching regularly, a member of the starting rotation. He knew what to expect and exceeded every expectation. He began to avail himself of Allan Roth, the team statistician, the first employed by a major league club. Over the years, Roth charted 26,450 Koufax pitches and 313 of his 397 games. Roth tracked each at-bat and the count on which the decisive pitch was made. His numbers demonstrated the obvious: It’s better to get ahead on the batter. But he quantified how much an advantage it was, showing Koufax the difference in the batting average against him when he was ahead in the count (.146) and behind (.286). From then on, whenever anyone asked what his best pitch was, Koufax would answer, “Strike one.” In the last five years of his career, he allowed only 2.1 walks per game, compared to the 4.8 he averaged his first seven seasons. In 1962, more than half the hitters he faced (55.6 per cent) found themselves in the unenviable position of hitting with two strikes against them.

  As Robert Pinsky, the poet, would later write: “People were amazed by him”—among them Pee Wee Reese. They weren’t close as teammates. But, Pee Wee’s son says, in The Captain’s final years, Koufax called more often than any other Dodger. Though Reese was too ill to be interviewed, he wrote shortly before his death: “To be honest about it, I thought the guy would never be a great pitcher. But he sure proved me wrong. When I retired and I was announcing the CBS Game of the Week, I came up to him while he was warming up. And he was really making the catcher’s mitt pop. So I went up and asked him, teasing him, ‘Where in the hell did you learn how to pitch like that? You can’t be that damn good.’

  “He said, ‘Grab a bat and get your ass up there at the plate.’ So I did. Here I am standing with a bat in my hand in my street clothes and I never saw anybody throw that hard in my life, and I’ve faced some of the greatest in the game. He had pinpoint control. I said, ‘How is your control on the outside part of the plate?’ I was amazed. He then said, ‘Do you want me to show you how good my control is inside?’

  “I said, ‘Hell, no.’”

  Chapter 12

  THE FIFTH INNING

  SANITARY HOSE WERE THE ONLY SOCKS Lou Johnson ever wore. He wore them high and he wore them the way he did everything else, ebulliently. Out of uniform, he went sockless. Socks were confining. He disliked anything that cramped his style. He had waited too long to get where he was going to keep his feelings to himself. It was one of the first things his teammates noticed about him when he was called up to replace Tommy Davis in May. The socks, or lack thereof.

  Louis Brown Johnson was a thirty-one-year-old bush-leaguer, a Southerner whose only previous claim to fame was being named outstanding rookie in the Cubs’ 1962 spring training camp. Davis was a two-time National League batting champion from Brooklyn. He wore socks. When Davis broke his ankle sliding into second base in May, the players expected a big name to fill his shoes. Instead, Bavasi summoned sockless Lou Johnson from the Dodgers Triple A team in Spokane, Washington. Johnson was the father of two young children, one a newborn. He liked to say he earned so little he cashed his check at the concession stand. His was a “not-quite” career: not quite a major-leaguer, not quite the Pacific Coast batting champion (he lost the 1964 title by a single point). A talent so marginal no big league club bothered to invite him to spring training in 1965. Others might have considered quitting. Johnson told his mother, “I can’t retire. I haven’t succeeded yet.”

  Peter O’Malley, the heir apparent who was running the Spokane club for his father, called Johnson into his office to t
ell him he was going to Cincinnati. Johnson was disconsolate, wondering how he would ever break into an outfield that boasted Frank Robinson and Vada Pinson. He figured if he was consigned to another year in Triple A, he might as well stay in Spokane. He told O’Malley he wouldn’t report. O’Malley replied that he wasn’t going to play for Cincinnati, he was joining the Dodgers in Cincinnati. “Phew!” Johnson replied, hugging his most proper boss.

  When Johnson arrived at Crosley Field, Koufax was the first to greet him, walking across the diamond to shake his hand. “He made me feel like a star amongst stars,” Johnson said.

  Every day Koufax greeted him the same way, ambling over to his locker, pulling up his pants leg, saying, “You’ve got the same socks on.” One day, Johnson came to the ballpark and found six boxes of new socks in his locker. “I get tired of seeing you wear the same color,” Koufax told him.

  That’s awful nice, Johnson thought. He was halfway across the clubhouse before he got the joke.

  In clubhouses and other salons where races mingled, people were learning to be careful about what they said. The new idiom, Black Power, was becoming part of the American vocabulary. But Koufax was a man so comfortable in his own skin he could tease a black teammate about his and thus make him feel welcome. Soon Johnson was fully integrated into the fabric of the team. He patrolled left field with the joie de vivre of a junkyard dog. Fans renamed the bleachers the “LBJ Ranch” in his honor. As the summer progressed and the pennant race heated up, Johnson rallied his teammates with the appropriated slogan “All the Way with LBJ.”

  He was in the middle of every rally and every conversation, carrying the Dodgers with his exuberance. “Tell ’em about the ear,” teammates would say. And “Sweet Lou” (as he quickly became known) would launch into the story about how he lost his ear in a bus accident and the doctor sewed it into his midriff, intending to reattach it later. Then Johnson would lift his shirt—and Dodger spirits—revealing an odd fleshy nub where the skin had shriveled up and died. “Doesn’t it bother you to have an ear down there?” visitors would ask. “Naw, it don't eat much,” Johnson would reply.