Sandy Koufax

by Jane Leavy

  His allegiance to Koufax was intense. “Sandy and Lou, that’s all you need,” he liked so say. So as he settled into the batter’s box in the bottom of the fifth inning, he was thinking, How am I going to get a run for Sandy?

  Rich Procter, one of Barry Pinsky’s friends, was worried. He’s gonna lose. They’re not scoring any runs. Rich Brame, who was slightly older than the rest of the boys at Barry’s party, was upset because none of the vendors would sell him a beer.

  Koufax started every game assuming he would get nothing. “Pitching fine,” Johnson called it. The Dodgers scored fewer than four runs a game for him, one less than they did for Drysdale, who could help his own cause. First in the league in earned run average, the Dodgers were seventh in batting. They didn’t just manufacture runs, they cobbled them together like piecework. They rarely got shut out. “Speed doesn’t have a slump,” Koufax always said. But laughers were as common as stand-up comedy in the collected works of Sophocles. When Koufax was on the mound, Alston often played for one run.

  “This year, Bob Hendley has worked thirty-seven innings and he has allowed ten home runs,” Scully said, hopefully, as Johnson came to the plate. “That’s averaging three home runs a game.”

  The Dodgers had only sixty-nine home runs, fewest in the league, and Drysdale had six of them. He was the team’s best pinch hitter, their only .300 batter, possessor of the highest slugging average on the club. But he wasn’t in the lineup. He was in the clubhouse getting a rubdown, listening to Scully apologize to area schoolchildren for his use of double negatives in the previous inning. “We were just having fun,” he said.

  Upstairs in the press box, beat reporters were beginning to speculate about the last time two pitchers threw nine innings of no-hit ball. Hendley was matching Koufax pitch for pitch. Inspired by the memory of that Oklahoma crop duster, he was pitching the game of his life, holding the Dodgers hostage to an assortment of unapologetic junk. For four innings, Hendley had seen nothing except Chris Krug’s target. It was as if his field of vision had been reduced to sixty feet six inches. Then, inexplicably, with the count 1 and 2 on Johnson, his concentration wavered. By the time he regained his composure the count was full.

  It could happen to anyone. Koufax had fallen behind three balls and two strikes on consecutive batters, Banks and Browne, in the top of the inning. Banks even had a good cut at a fastball, fouling it straight back through the gate behind home plate, where Buhler had been standing an inning before. Koufax got both outs. Hendley was not as fortunate.

  The payoff pitch to Johnson could have been called either way. “The three-two pitch…” Scully hesitated, not wanting to presume on such a close call. “Taken high, ball four, there it is, the first base runner of the night. Some of the Cubs are howling at Ed Vargo and Vargo motions with his right hand to indicate the pitch was high, above the shoulder.”

  The notation BB was made on a thousand scorecards. In a season of limited means, a bunt was inevitable. Hendley fielded the ball tentatively and threw to first. “Hendley had a play at second if he had fielded the ball cleanly,” Scully said, “but in his haste, he dropped it and had to go to first.”

  As Johnson slid safely into second base, Krug thought: We had him by ten feet! Johnson thought: I’m going to steal third.

  Hendley looked over at second base. Scully noted Johnson’s liberal lead. There’s only one out, Johnson reminded himself, as Hendley went into his motion. Somebody’s gonna hit a high chopper or something, get me home.

  On the first pitch, he went to third. He could tell the fielders were shocked by their belated response. It was an enlivening play, the kind Johnson had been making ever since joining the team. The languid tension that had been building for five innings erupted as he slid into the bag.

  The rookie catcher hurried his tardy throw to third. The left fielder, playing in his first major league game, ended up with the ball, wondering, Why did he throw it to me?

  Krug knew he shouldn’t have thrown it. Johnson had gotten too good a jump on Hendley. Still, Krug thought, It wasn’t a bad throw. High. Maybe a little higher than a little high but catchable.

  The way he saw it, Santo was late covering third. Johnson knocked him down making his slide, making the ball uncatchable. Santo saw it differently. He saw the ball sail over his head. He thought, When you rush that throw, you throw it wild.

  Hendley agreed with both of them. But it wasn’t their fault. He had allowed the walk to Johnson and allowed him too big a lead off second. He thought, It wasn’t a terrible, terrible throw. But it wasn’t playable, either.

  Johnson had the clearest view of all—safe at home plate. “The ball got there first, Lou got there second, and Santo got there third.”

  The verdict flashed on the scoreboard: E2. Richard Hume marked his program with baseball’s terse shorthand: no hits, a walk, a sacrifice, a stolen base, and an error. The Dodgers had scored a run without an official at-bat.

  Chapter 13

  WHEN WE WERE YOUNG

  IT WAS THE HOMELY ENVELOPE that caught Robert Pinsky’s poetic imagination. Cobbled together with precision, Scotch tape, and a razor blade, this ad hoc parcel was the handiwork of a person, not his people, the singular vision of the man whose name appeared in block print in the upper left-hand corner: KOUFAX.

  Pinsky, poet laureate of the United States, was staying with friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the summer. No one knew he was at that address. So the fact of the envelope’s finding him the way it did, in pristine, almost divinely sanctioned condition, was magical. Then he opened it and it was another time.

  October 1963. The pregame world series handshake is ritual theater, part of autumn’s emotional calendar. Pitchers embrace. Shutterbugs snap. Scribes mill. They’ve seen this act before. On October 2, 1963, the requisite photograph was taken at Yankee Stadium. Sandy Koufax and Whitey Ford clasping hands at home plate: two New York kids who made good.

  This image, an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch missive from another time, was what Pinsky found inside the improvised package. It was autographed by both, Koufax citing the page number of the poem Pinsky had written about them. Though it arrived without fanfare or padding, no protection at all except God’s, the photo was unblemished and unlined, like the two young lefties. Koufax had heard a family member was ailing. He thought a surprise might cheer him up. Pinsky thought: It doesn’t get any better than this.

  The photograph is not so much a portrait of their youth as Youth, adolescent America exploring New Frontiers. Cynicism and assassination were not yet cultural imperatives. John Glenn was a hero. Camelot was a Broadway hit. Khrushchev had backed down. That October, that month before November 1963, was an apotheosis. So much was imminent. So much hadn’t happened.

  But things were “blowing in the wind.” In June, the University of Alabama was desegregated and John Kennedy went to Berlin. In August, Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed his dream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and McDonald’s sold its one billionth hamburger. In September, four little girls were murdered in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. “A terrible day, a day that never ended,” the minister called it. (That day finally ended on May 22, 2002, when a former Ku Klux Klansman named Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted of the crime.)

  A housewife named Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a revolutionary treatise dedicated to “All the New Women and the New Men.” Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, stars of Beach Party, presumably were not among them. Trolls and elephant jokes were big. “Sugar Shack” was number one—with a bullet!—when Koufax and Ford posed together before game one of the world series.

  In the photograph, the reporters recede into the background the way they did then: balding white guys in white shirts and black ties who’d still look black and white even if the picture had been taken in color. They wore thick, black horn-rims and fedoras over thinning brush cuts. The story was still the story, not the telling of it.

  Over their shoulders
, the scoreboard loomed, blank and expectant. And in the distance the Bronx County Courthouse, not yet the symbol of urban decay Tom Wolfe would make it in his 1980s novel Bonfire of the Vanities. Unseen children played hopscotch on the steps of the Beaux Arts mansions of the Grand Concourse—fashioned after the Champs Élysées—the tenants as white as Whitey’s home uniform. Co-Op City, the vast, misguided urban renewal project built in the north Bronx that would displace the white population and turn the Stadium neighborhood into a slum, wouldn’t be a fact for another two years. The Concourse Plaza Hotel at the corner of 161st Street, where the Babe once stashed his babes, was still a swank joint.

  The foreground belongs to Sandy and Whitey. The stubble on their cheeks reveals when the picture was taken: Starting pitchers never shave. They are looking in opposite directions, their eyes diverging even as their fates intertwined. Whitey’s pitching arm is draped casually over Sandy’s shoulder in a kind of embrace, their caps perched lightly on their heads. The stitched white satin lettering signified and summarized like hieroglyphs: L.A. vs. N.Y. Brooklyn vs. the Bronx. The Pacific Rim Upstarts vs. the East Coast Establishment. The Dodgers vs. the Yankees. Koufax vs. Ford.

  It was this set of opposites that Pinsky invoked in his poem “The Night Game,” describing Whitey’s pink skin “shining like a burn” and the “white unpigmented halo of his hair/So ordinary and distinct.” He spoke for generations of ethnic Americans when he wrote, “To be white and called/ Something like Ed Ford/Seemed aristocratic,/A rare distinction.” And: “Possibly I believed only gentiles/And blondes could be left-handed.”

  There beside Whitey stood Koufax with his decidedly Semitic visage. He was still a pitcher, not yet a symbol, a man who welcomed his fate. Perhaps that accounts for the dimpled, sideways grin, the lightness of bearing, the openness of his face.

  He had his coming-out party in 1961 along with JFK. Vigor and speed would be served. Kennedy wanted twenty-five Thunderbirds for his inaugural parade but they were all sold out. As Todd Gitlin observed in his cultural history The Sixties, there was implicit bravado in all that chrome: We had the goods and we could afford the goodies.

  Going into the 1961 season, Koufax was a career 36-and-40 pitcher, a study in mediocrity. He announced himself in May with a 1–0 victory over Bob Gibson in St. Louis, a taut three-hitter decided by Tommy Davis’s seventh-inning home run. In the next day’s Los Angeles Times Gibson was described “as the former Harlem Globetrotters’ melon manipulator.” Koufax’s name was misspelled. That wouldn’t happen again.

  By July, he was an All-Star. By season’s end, he had broken Christy Mathewson’s fifty-eight-year-old single-season strikeout record, needing only 256 innings to fan 269 batters. The achievement was overshadowed by more ominous events. The East Germans began building their wall. The Bay of Pigs proved a quagmire. Duck and cover drills were practiced. Freedom riders were attacked. The Domino Effect was invoked. The first two military companies were dispatched to a place called Vietnam. Roger Maris’s hair fell out as he pursued Babe Ruth’s record sixty home runs. Koufax’s record received scant attention. Stan Hochman wrote in the Philadelphia Daily News: “Nobody called from Cooperstown to ask for the baseball that blurred past Pancho Herrera…. A guy breaks a record that has stood for fifty-eight seasons and he gets treated as if he has German measles.”

  Sixty-two should have been his year. Walter O’Malley unveiled his new state-of-the-art stadium tucked in the Elysian Hills, a pitchers’ paradise with generous foul territory and a terrible hitting background configured to enhance Dodger pitching. And it did. In his first season at Chavez Ravine, Koufax lowered his home earned run average from 4.29 to 1.75; Drysdale lowered his from 2.83 to 2.11.

  It should have been the Dodgers’ year too. They hit better than the 1961 Yankees. Tommy Davis led the league in batting. Maury Wills revolutionized the game by stealing 104 bases. “Before Maury it was just a bunch of slow white guys playing,” Koufax liked to say.

  The year began promisingly. One night during spring training, Norm Sherry prevailed upon Koufax to join him at the Flame, a joint popular with stewardesses and ballplayers. Koufax wasn’t a boozer; he generally preferred a good book, a good bottle of wine, and a smoke. “There were three stewardesses sitting at a bar,” Sherry said. “One of them grabs Sandy’s arm and says, ‘You’re coming with me.’ He said, ‘See ya, Norm.’”

  The memory stuck with Sherry because it was so out of character. Maybe, finally, it was Koufax’s turn to get lucky. It was a sexy year. Liz and Dick fell in love, Henry Miller’s licentious fiction finally gained admission to the New World, and Helen Gurley Brown topped the best-seller list with Sex and the Single Girl. The Pill celebrated its second birthday, making sex safe in a way it had never been before. Phil Collier began referring to Koufax in the San Diego Union as “the playboy bachelor.” He was as telegenic as JFK but without the hubris and a whole lot more discreet.

  There were tremors of cultural upheaval but they did not register on the collective Richter Scale. The Port Huron Statement, the manifesto of the nascent student movement, was issued by the Students for a Democratic Society and ignored. Marilyn Monroe committed suicide in August and no one thought it had anything to do with the Kennedys. So what if The Twist was banned in Tampa? The Russians backed down in Cuba, didn’t they? And we weren’t going to have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore. Americans were having too good a time to intuit what lay just ahead.

  In his first start of the season, the second game played at Chavez Ravine, Koufax gave up four hits, at least one of which was lost in the new untested lights. It could have been a no-hitter. In his fourth start, he struck out 18, equaling the record he shared with Bob Feller. Four days later, he beat the Pirates, 2–1. More significant than the victory was Alston’s decision to allow him to bat with the score tied in the bottom of the eighth, an uncharacteristic act of trust duly noted in the morning papers.

  In late May and early June, he pitched four consecutive complete games, striking out forty-nine men. On June 13, he beat Warren Spahn, 2–1. His golfing buddy, Ken Still, flew in to see the game. Koufax was altering itineraries. It was a cold night in Milwaukee and Still huddled in a blanket giggling as Koufax drove in the winning run with his first major league home run. Spahn slammed his glove to the ground, yelling at Koufax as he giddy-yapped around second base.

  Five days later, Koufax teamed up with Tommy Davis to beat “the old melon manipulator” again. Another 1–0 loss for Gibson, another game-winning home run for Davis. For the first time in his career, Koufax pitched a complete game and walked no one. They celebrated by dancing around the clubhouse crowing: “Us Brooklyn boys got to stick together.”

  Later, Davis and his wife had the misfortune to run into Gibson at an L.A. nightspot. “I walked over to him and he said, ‘Hi, how you doing, Tom?’” Davis remembered. “My wife says, ‘Oh, is this the guy you hit the home run off?’ I’m thinking, ‘I’m dead. I’m dead. I’m dead.’ He looked at her and said, ‘Yes, I’m the guy that he hit the home run off.’ With that mean look in his eyes. I said, ‘Honey, we have to go.’

  “I told him, ‘I’m not saying no more about it because I know you’re gonna get me in the hereafter.’ He says, ‘You’re right. I’m gonna get you up there, boy.’”

  Gibson’s still growling about it. “They are not fond memories. People come and ask how it was to pitch against Sandy Koufax. Sandy Koufax was a pain in the ass. You pitched against him and you knew the score was going to be two to one, one to zero. Normally, two to one, one to zero, I won.”

  In eight games between June 13 and July 12, Koufax was 6 and 2, allowing only five earned runs in 67 1?3 innings. His ERA was 0.67. He struck out seventy-seven batters and walked twenty. On June 30, Koufax pitched his first no-hitter, a 5–0 triumph over the Mets. You could see it coming—particularly if you had Ron Perranoski’s seat in the bullpen. Dodger relievers always enjoyed the day Koufax pitched—and the evening before too. Their exploits became the stuff
of team legend. “This one time, Pete Richert did go out and have a good time and wasn’t feeling well the next day and, lo and behold, Koufax was struggling on the mound,” Ron Fairly said. “And Alston walked out to the mound and asked, ‘Sandy, how do you feel?’ And Sandy said, ‘A lot better than the guy you have warming up.’”

  Another time in Philadelphia, Larry Sherry and Stan Williams hatched a plan in the bullpen to rob a bank while Koufax was pitching. “What do you think you got to do down in the bullpen for two and a half hours?” Sherry said.

  The bank was just across the street from Connie Mack Stadium and there was a door in the bullpen to a maintenance room with an exit directly across the street from the bank. Williams cased the joint and planned their escape route. “We’d wear street clothes underneath our uniforms, take our uniforms off, go over there about maybe the seventh or eighth inning, rob the bank, come back, and put the money in our baseball bags,” Sherry said. “It was getaway day. The stuff goes right to the plane. We had our own private plane. Put the money in the big bag with all the catching equipment. Stanley says, ‘It’ll work, it’ll work.’ He started figuring up a time line. You know, he got serious about it, Stanley.”

  Perranoski put his seat in the Dodger Stadium bullpen to better use. From his vantage point—feet up on the wire, chair tilted back—he could gauge the quality of Koufax’s stuff. On June 30, 1962, he knew right away the Mets were in trouble. “From my angle back there, sitting in the bullpen, his curveball used to break from the first deck, it looked like,” he said. “And all of a sudden it’s breaking from the second deck and I said to the guys, ‘They’re in for a tough day.’”