 Sandy Koufax: Dodger LegendbyMike YawnFollowing a twelve-year major league career, Sandy Koufax retired when he was thirty years old. His career, with its combination of brevity and brilliance, earned him the bittersweet distinction of becoming the youngest person elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame. His career was split into two equal halves—equal, that is, in terms of chronology, not quality. Over his first six years, Koufax put together a 36-40 record, averaging a meager six wins per season. The next year was a watershed: he won eighteen games, led the league in strikeouts, and made the All-Star game. He pitched for only five more seasons, but they were the greatest five seasons a major league pitcher has ever strung together. The lefty won 111 games, while losing only 34. He led the league in ERA every year, and he won three Cy Young Awards, earning the nickname, “The Left Hand of God.” By this time, however, Koufax was pitching in almost constant pain. He needed elbow reconstruction, a procedure that would not be developed for another decade. In lieu of surgery, Koufax relied on pain killers, Cortisone, Codeine, and Capsolin, the latter a concoction drawn from chili peppers which convinced the brain to disregard pain messages. By the age of thirty, Koufax had had enough. A month after winning the Cy Young Award in his twelfth season, Koufax announced his retirement. In leaving the game in 1966, Koufax was able to leave on his own terms, before his individual skills diminished. He also left before runaway free agency, extravagant salaries, and performance enhancements diminished the game. Koufax may now be 76, but he is baseball’s version of Dorian Gray; his public image preserved as that of a talented, 30-year old Cy Young winner, unsullied by age or baseball’s excesses. * * * Jane Leavy is a former sportswriter and feature writer for the Washington Post. She turned to novels in 1990 with the acclaimed Squeeze Play, and has since written two biographies: The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood (2010) and Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy (2002), both of which were highly acclaimed. Several months ago, Yawn interviewed Leavy about Koufax and his legacy. Mike Yawn: You organized your biography of Sandy Koufax by alternating between slices of his perfect game and slices of his life and times. How did that format occur to you? Jane Leavy: I wanted to do one of his games, because the pitcher controls so much of what happens. The choices would have the first game of the 1963 World Series, where he struck out fifteen Yankees and broke the World Series record. That was a possibility. Another possibility would have been game seven of the 1965 World Series. But that game, as great as it was, was a different type of great. That was the game he was pitching on just pure guts, adrenaline, and muscle memory. It was the third game he pitched in eight days. He was pitching on fumes. But there’s something irrefutably perfect about a perfect game, and so I decided to go with the 1965 perfect game against the Cubs. It just seemed to me to be structurally parallel with his career. In the early innings he wasn’t completely “on.” And he was “iffy” early in his career, in the sense that no one knew if he was going to be able to harness his control. But as the game went along, and as his career went along, he became unhittable, and then finally unsurpassed, and that struck me as the best way, of those three games, of telling the story of his career. Once I chose that game, it was easy to interpose portions of his life and career and the history of that time within each of those innings. Mike: Once you decided to go with that game, you had the challenge of piecing it together in a thorough and riveting manner, almost forty years after the fact. How did you find the fan’s audio tape of Vin Scully’s radio broadcast and the video clips taken by [Dodgers’] trainer Bill Buhler? Jane: I think it's serendipity. In journalism you’re always taught to “make the calls.” Well, I had tried to reach Dave Smith of Retrosheet for a long time, and being the foolish, incompetent web surfer that I was, I never bothered to check retrosheet.org as opposed to .com or .net. When I did make the connection, I was looking to see what they had by way of recaps and play-by-plays of the perfect game. I had absolutely no way of knowing that Smith was such a Koufax fan that as a teenager he asked his dad to tape the game with the reel-to-reel that he kept by the side of his bed. That’s just manna from heaven! And then Bill Buhler’s footage was in Major League Baseball’s vast library. They’ll duplicate things for you if you are researching. The problem is that they send you reels of raw footage—a lot of it doesn’t have sound, or is repetitive and out of sequence. But I saw this footage, and I recognized that it was quite unlike anything else I was seeing, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was. So I called Jeff Torborg (Koufax’s catcher for the perfect game), who had become a friend, and I had him come over and see it. And it was a warm, beautiful, sunny Florida day, and here is this former catcher in front of the television, just the way he would have squatted behind home plate. Jeff went through it pitch by pitch and identified it. Mike: You covered Koufax’s mechanics very thoroughly. Were you hoping to provide a new perspective on Koufax, was it just a strong interest of yours, or was it that you thought Koufax’s mechanics deserved special attention? Jane: I think the hardest thing for a writer to do, or for an athlete to communicate, is to put a sequence of muscular actions and reactions into words because it isn’t really linear. Often, the muscles are working in concert or at lightning-quick speed and that makes it difficult to capture it in a sentence or a paragraph. It was the hardest part of that book, and it was the hardest part, by far, of the Mickey Mantle book. Mike: You mentioned Jeff Torborg earlier. He’s often credited with helping Nolan Ryan with his mechanics. Do you think his years with Koufax helped him understand pitching mechanics which allowed him to help Ryan? Jane: It’s a good question and a fair question, and one I can’t answer for you. I never asked Jeff about it. I just really don’t know. Mike: You take pains to provide the background of the times, not only with baseball but also with the larger social context: salaries, player leverage, media coverage, injury treatments, and race. Do you see Koufax’s career in the 50s and 60s as transitional, linking the guys from the 40s and 50s with the modern, free-agency era? Jane: I certainly saw him that way in terms of his dual holdout with Drysdale. I was struck when interviewing Fred Wilpon [Mets owner and friend of Koufax’s] by his description of Sandy’s grandfather, Max Lichtenstein, and how he was really the man in Koufax’s life for much of Koufax’s childhood. Sandy’s grandfather took him to Coney Island, taught him his values and his culture. He also explained why he didn’t keep working at Consolidated Edison. He showed up to work there, and the big gates closed behind the men as they reported for their shifts. His grandfather told him, “I came to America to get away from locked gates.” He never returned to work there. His grandfather was somewhat of a leftist and a socialist. And that was completely consistent in my mind with the man who decided along with Drysdale to orchestrate this small, fledgling union, albeit a union of two, but a union of two important cogs in the Dodger rotation. They recognized the power in numbers. So, yeah, I saw him definitely as transitional in that way. Medically, I’ve heard him say, or I’ve heard other people tell me that he said, “Well, if there had been Tommy John surgery . . .,” He could have been back in a year. The first Tommy John surgery was eight years later. So, yeah, he just missed, a generation off. He was transitional in that way, too. Mike: When you look at Koufax’s contemporaries, guys like Bob Gibson and Whitey Ford, and Don Drysdale and Juan Marichal, can you compare them? Or is Koufax’s career trajectory too unusual for comparison? Jane: Well, it is hard to compare for all those reasons. Sandy has a realistic view of himself in comparison to these other guys that pitched longer and whose numbers reflect that. What I would argue is that, at his best, nobody was better, and nobody threw a ball better than he did, ever. Mike: A couple of years ago Joe Maddon said that he was just waiting on David Price to have his “epiphany moment” like Sandy Koufax. And Tim Lincecum compared his own delivery to Koufax’s delivery. Is there anybody pitching today that reminds you of Koufax? Jane: Not yet. Mike: That’s kind of an unfair question. Jane: No, no, I don’t think it’s an unfair question, but I think that one definition of greatness is when that person is so great that there’s nobody like him. And there was nobody like Koufax. Books mentioned in this column:
Mike Yawn is a professor of political science at Sam Houston State University, where he has published articles in The Journal of Politics, American Politics Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, American Review of Politics, Political Behavior, and Film and History. For fun, he writes about almost everything but politics. You can learn more about him at Mike Yawn, his blog. Contact Mike.
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