Marvel on the Mound

It can be said that there was no better preparation for life’s vicissitudes than being a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. After that, no defeat was foreign to you. Hard knocks were not only expected but welcomed; it was how you knew you were alive. What would be tragedy to a Yankee fan was risible to us, mere lagniappe.

As a boy, I would gather with my friends outside the right field fence of Ebbets Field, waiting for a homerun ball to fly over so that we could give chase as it rolled merrily down the street. But when the Dodgers were up--we could just see home plate through a tiny space where the fence didn’t quite touch the ground--we sat back against the fence and rested. The Dodgers didn’t hit home runs; they were lucky to hit the ball out of the infield.

But a true fan is forever, and we remained loyal even during the later years when the Dodgers became winners. By then, our lives had been set. A scarred psyche could handle the fact that this team was not the team we had once loved. This team offered a sunny post-Depression view of life: Given talent, you could win. But, when news filtered through the borough in the early ‘50s that the Dodgers had acquired a local product, a fire-balling southpaw flinger guaranteed to turn the league on its ear, we could temper our rejoicing with the knowledge that he was also Jewish. Something bad could always happen.

The pitcher’s name was Sandy Koufax, and he did indeed turn the league on its ear. His life--at least his baseball life--has now been told with a reverence bordering on idolatry by Jane Leavy, a former sportswriter for the Washington Post. Still, there is a lot to be reverential about. Leavy points out that for “five consecutive years, from 1962 through 1966, Koufax led the National League in Earned Run Average (he is the only pitcher to have done that). Four times he led the National League in strikeouts. Three times, he won at least twenty-five games. Ninety-seven times, he struck out ten or more batters .... [In] his last year, pitching with a crippled, arthritic arm, he won twenty-seven games and completed twenty-seven games. And he never missed a start.”

The idea that any pitcher today might complete seven games, let alone 27, is like thinking games might last less than three hours or that hitters not be allowed to stroll around the stadium between pitches, flexing their muscles. Koufax’s record is a quaint reminder of olden days when a pitcher who couldn’t throw nine innings was considered a sissy.

Koufax was a marvel not because of the games he finished but how he finished them. He had only two pitches, a fastball and a curve. But as Willie Mays put it, “He threw them very well.” It didn’t matter if the batter guessed which one was coming. According to Willie Stargell, another mean hitter, “It was like trying to drink coffee with a fork.”

Koufax also inspired a certain headiness of prose, and Leavy is not immune to this. “They called it a yellow hammer. They called it a biter and they called it a bitch. Mostly, they called it unfair. It started a foot over your head and headed south in a hurry. Hitters swore it broke two feet. From the letters to the knees. From the table to the floor. From heaven to God’s green earth. They said it fell out of the sky.”

Koufax did not, however, start as a baseball player. At 6 feet, 2 inches tall with a tremendous vertical leap, his first love was basketball. He was captain of the team at Lafayette High School in the Bensonhurst part of Brooklyn, a middle-class, mostly Jewish and Italian neighborhood. His compatriots grew up to be such disparate luminaries as Larry King, Alan Dershowitz, Jerry Della Femina and Vito Farinola, who became Vic Damone. The rising baseball star was Fred Wilpon, Koufax’s best friend. But Wilpon rose only to the ownership of the Mets, a lesser stardom.

Koufax’s ambition was to play for the New York Knicks. Once, his high school team practiced against some of the Knicks’ players, and Koufax dunked over Harry Gallatin, a premium pro. The next time he tried it, Gallatin and Al McGuire leveled him. He never did get to the Knicks. He went on to the University of Cincinnati and, on a school trip to New Orleans, the baseball team found it lacked players. Koufax had played some sandlot baseball and offered to pitch. That was it for basketball.

He pitched only one season of college ball, going 3 and 1 with a 2.81 ERA. But word had gotten out; there was this kid who threw very, very hard. Major league scouts began coming around and there were tryouts for the Giants and the Pirates. The Yankees, as Leavy says, “with their customary ethnic sensitivity, sent a Jewish scout to court him, offending his family.” Al Campanis, working for the Dodgers, got Koufax a tryout at Ebbets Field. Rube Walker caught him and afterward said, “Whatever he wants, give it to him. I wouldn’t let him out of the clubhouse.”

The Dodgers signed him for a first-year salary of $6,000 and a $14,000 bonus. Under the league bonus rule, they had to keep Koufax on the roster for at least three years, so to make room, they sent another pitcher, Tommy Lasorda, to the minors. Leavy feels Lasorda is still sore about this. The rest of the team was not exactly welcoming either. They were battling for a pennant and would have preferred a pitcher who could get the ball over the plate once in a while.

And there was the ever-present anti-Semitism to go along with baseball’s pervasive racism. The black players befriended him; it was a time, as Leavy says, “when blacks and Jews could still identify with each other as persecuted minorities.” He was especially protected by Don Newcombe and Joe Black. Black was the pitcher who in one game put a definitive stop to the racist taunting he was getting from the opposing team. He simply fired his fast ball into their dugout. He claimed he wasn’t trying to hit anyone, and he didn’t, but the taunting stopped after that. “They hated Jews as much as they hated blacks,” Newcombe said. “I don’t know if Sandy ever knew that, but that’s why we took care of Sandy.”

It was not easy to figure out what Koufax knew or didn’t know. He was a loner and kept his thoughts mostly to himself. But during spring training in Florida, he would visit the black players at their segregated hotel and pal around with them. He was a liberal who had not yet learned to regard his liberalism as self-hate. His idol was his grandfather, a socialist. The first few professional years, he was inconsistent but brilliant. He was like the girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead. When he could locate the plate, he was unhittable.

Then in 1957, stricken with greed, Walter O’Malley moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles. The city had given him 315 acres and a promise to evict the families, mostly Mexican American, who lived on them. A great new stadium would be built with all the amenities, although without water fountains so that the fans would have to spend money to quench their thirst. It was the year of the Great Betrayal. Brooklyn mourned, but Koufax flourished. He had learned to pitch.

His career after that was consistently brilliant. “For the last five years of his career, Koufax was unassailable. He led the majors in every pitching category ... [and was] named Pitcher of the Decade.” His teammate, Don Drysdale, another overpowering pitcher, said, “He’s the only pitcher I’ve ever seen [who], if he pitched a no-hitter every time, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.” Then his arm went bad. The trainers said it was because of his unusual build, his “extreme” muscles; he had traumatic arthritis. Before each start, they would work on him for an hour and a half. They rubbed his arm with Capsolin, a salve derived from chili peppers so hot that the trainers wore rubber gloves and ladled it on with tongue depressors. After a game, Koufax’s arm would swell up and sometimes hemorrhage and turn black. But he never missed a start. It is a statement to carve on the tombstones of crippled ballplayers. He lived up to the tradition: He was a gamer; he played with pain. Until finally he had to quit.

Leavy tells the story well, alternating biographical chapters with an inning-by-inning account of a perfect game he pitched against the Chicago Cubs. But her Koufax is pretty much perfection all around. If you pricked him, there is an even chance he wouldn’t bleed. He has no discernible flaws; everyone speaks well of him. It all seems deserved but makes the book monochromatic. Koufax agreed to her interviewing him “so long as it is clear the book is based on what others said, not on what I’m saying.” She agreed not to interview his closest relatives and “chose not to call his ex-wives, ex-girlfriends or the woman with whom he currently shares his life. You don’t need to know everything to write the truth.”

Maybe not, but if you want to know the man whose biography you are writing, it’s nice to know a bit more than this. Leavy has written a very good and meaningful book about baseball. She knows the game, and she is acute in placing it in its social context. She writes gracefully and with feeling. Koufax obviously means a great deal to her--as a man, as a pitcher and as the Jewish player who refused to pitch on Yom Kippur. Within the restrictions she’s imposed on herself, she makes him interesting and believable. But it is not necessarily prurience that would like a little more from those wives and girlfriends.