Dodgers Feel the Pain of Death Again : More Than Menace

Don Drysdale--powerful, indestructible, larger-than-life Don Drysdale--is dead.

God has given Roy Campanella someone to catch.

One week after the death of the Dodger who dealt with physical adversity at its utmost comes the death of the Dodger who seemed most robust. “Big D,” Donald Scott Drysdale, strode through life with an easy lope and a proud, upright carriage, giving no clue that his mortality was under attack from the inside-out.

He died of an apparent heart attack Saturday, three weeks from his 57th birthday.

To a generation of baseball fans, Drysdale was a pitcher custom-made for the game, tall and talented, fast and fearless, the Bob Feller or Roger Clemens of his day.

To generations thereafter, he was a voice of summer, a constant television and radio baseball companion, casual and carefree.

He went from his prime to prime time with the same easy loll with which he occupied a room.

Whether in the company of pressed suits, flannel uniforms or scruffy jeans, Drysdale breezed along in open-collared knits or florid tropical patterns, the picture of relaxation, at work or at play.

None of the menace that earmarked his career as a pitcher was present anyplace else.

On a mound, 60 feet 6 inches away, Big D must have looked 60 feet 6 inches tall. He threw hard and he came sidearm in a manner that was known to terrify the weak of knee.

Batters who dug in against him did so at their own risk. Frank Robinson, Willie Mays, no matter how famous the name, Drysdale contended that home plate belonged to the pitcher. Don’t crowd it and don’t crowd him.

In his biography, Drysdale said: “All I wanted to do as a pitcher with the Dodgers was win, and everything worked out. In fact, when I was voted into the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1984, I read the inscription engraved on my plaque. It stated all the particulars--how many games I’d won, how many shutouts I’d pitched, how many batters I’d struck out and so forth.

“But it also said that one of the reasons I’d survived was because I was ‘intimidating.’

“I guess I was.”

He was, of course, so much more. Drysdale broke into baseball at a time when there were only 16 teams, with none of the easy-does-it passage to the majors that today’s understaffed, pitching-poor game affords. In his first full Dodger season, Drysdale started 34 games, won 17, threw four shutouts and struck out more than twice as many batters as he walked.

Some of the things he did during his Dodger career were mind-boggling.

How strong was he?

He hit 29 home runs; that’s how strong.

How mean was he?

Once, after decking a batter, Drysdale was covering the plate when that same player came sliding home, spikes high. “You cock that leg and I’ll rip it off,” Drysdale said, prompting a bench-clearing brawl.

Good thing it was only an exhibition game.

Before an All-Star Game once, Big D was tipped off that Rusty Staub had been seen inside the National League’s clubhouse snooping into Drysdale’s shaving kit, searching for utensils used to illegally doctor a baseball.

Next time they met on opposite sides, Staub stepped up and Drysdale’s first pitch put him down.

“That’s for looking through my damn shaving kit,” Drysdale yelled.

It was a style that spilled over to his broadcasting work, where Drysdale rarely missed a chance to defend a pitcher in a beanball dispute with a batter.

That was his nature. It was a gunslinger’s code--here’s a line in the dirt; I dare you to cross over it.

But he should be remembered for much, much more than this.

Whereas the death of Campanella was rightfully remembered as the passing of a true-blue Dodger, Drysdale was one of the last of the Dodgers who represented them in Brooklyn and Los Angeles alike.

A relic of an age gone by, he also was forever young. Drysdale was scarcely 10 years older than Nolan Ryan, a man still pitching today.

“Death! where is thy victory?” the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, and it is a question that sends a shudder through the Dodger organization this week, as two of their greatest victors have so abruptly been taken from them. For Campy and Big D had not detached themselves from the Dodgers, as had so many others before them; they remained very much a part of the team, day by day, night after night, all these seasons later.

Two of the mighty have fallen.

Boys of Summer, side by side.