Koufax Doesn’t Deserve Kahn Job

I can’t understand why you devoted nearly an entire page of the July 15 sports section to Roger Kahn’s uncalled-for, vicious, and to a degree, anti-Semitic diatribe against Sandy Koufax. Then again, I shouldn’t be surprised. For more than 40 years, Kahn still can’t get over the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn and takes every opportunity to remind the world. Roger, get lost, ya bum.

JOE COHEN, Los Angeles

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Was Sandy Koufax’s limited playing time early in his career because of Manager Walt Alston’s “latent anti-Semitism”? Kahn raises the issue and pronounces it “a fair question.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t offer a single piece of evidence to support such an outrageous accusation.

In any case, Koufax was hardly “condemned to Dodger Siberia.” True, he took the mound only a dozen times in 1955, but he was 19 years old and erratic. During the 1958 season, when he was 22 and still erratic, he got 26 starts and appeared in a quarter of the Dodgers’ games. The next year, Alston handed him the ball in the World Series--twice.

Since when is groundless speculation “a fair question”?

LEE GREEN, Ventura

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In his whatever-it-was in The Times, Roger Kahn rightly shot down ESPN’s fantasy that Sandy Koufax was the greatest of all great pitchers, and nuttily suggested that he wasn’t Jewish enough.

The question: Was Koufax a pitcher or a Jewish pitcher?

The answer: Was Einstein a scientist or a Jewish scientist?

Koufax famously excused himself from pitching a World Series game that fell on a Jewish holy day. Not enough for Kahn. The most obsessively private of stars, Koufax wouldn’t go public with anything more than his thrilling performances. A generation later, Kahn is still annoyed.

Further, although he “cannot be sure,” Kahn also sullied the late Walt Alston as possibly a “latent anti-Semite.”

Was Freud a psychiatrist or a Jewish psychiatrist? Kahn needs an appointment.

LARRY MERCHANT, Santa Monica

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As Kahn points out, Koufax was self-effacing, polite and private. When I mailed Sandy a check (for $1.50) shortly after the 1965 World Series, knowing that in order to cash it, he would have to “autograph” the back and it would be returned to me by the bank, I knew he would not let his biggest admirer down.

JIM WORTHEN, Pismo Beach