Baseball: Mr. Cool & the Pros

Any relationship between the World Series and the season that precedes it is often purely coincidental. A team that won a record 111 games during the regular season loses four straight to one that won 97. A pinchhitter comes off the bench to clout two pinchhit home runs. A substitute outfielder makes one fantastic catch, brushes briefly with immortality—and for years afterward, people ask: Whatever became of Sandy Amoros? But last week’s Series stuck strictly to the script.

The Los Angeles Dodgers won it the same way they won the National League pennant—battling from behind scratching out hits, scrambling for runs’ with the indifference of a team that had been through it all before. The Minnesota Twins lost it in the finest American League fashion—standing proudly at the plate, flexing their muscles, waiting for the big home run that never came.

Maury & Mudcat. There were no instant heroes. The Series belonged to the pros, the ballplayers who put their teams there in the first place—and they professed elaborate calm. “I just had an average day,” shrugged Dodger Shortstop Maury Wills after the fifth game, in which he stole a base, scored two runs, and rapped out four hits to tie a Series record. “I’m still no Maury Wills ” insisted Centerfielder Willie Davis, who stole three bases in one game. “I had a hell of a good time,” said Rightfielder Ron Fairly, only 5 ft. 10 in. but the top slugger in the Series, with three doubles, two homers, a .379 batting average and six RBI’s. Twins’ Leftfielder Bob Allison saved one game with a diving catch, won another with a two-run homer—and still insisted, “I was a bust,” because he struck out nine times.

All that modesty was too much for Jim (“Mudcat”) Grant, the American League’s No. 1 pitcher (season’s record: 21-7). “I’m cool, sexy and suave,” Grant announced, and he confided to newsmen that his broad shoulders were the result of eating possum as a kid. Star of the Twins’ 8-2 first-game victory, Mudcat was knocked out of the box in the fourth game at Los Angeles. Two days later, with the Twins trailing 3-2 in the Series, he trudged to the mound again. Fortified by hot and cold showers (“to get the bad blood out”), he beat Los Angeles 5-1, supplying the clincher himself with a three-run, 395-ft. homer in the sixth inning.

“It’s a homer! It’s a homer!” Mudcat yelled, dancing gleefully around the bases and broad jumping the last 10 ft. to the plate. Newsmen wanted to know what kind of pitch he had hit. Grant grinned. “It was the best pitch I ever saw. A curve that dropped a foot. And I hit it into the teeth of a gale.”

The best that the Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax could manage was one single all through the Series. Everybody knows though, that Koufax can’t hit or run and that his fielding is so erratic his own manager says, “I worry every time he lobs the ball to first base.” What’s more, he is a physical wreck: a circulatory ailment nearly ended his career in 1962, and he now has “traumatic arthritis” in his pitching arm. But over five short seasons, Koufax has reached a pinnacle attained by no other pitcher. He has won 102 games and lost only 38, pitched a record four no-hitters (including a perfect game), struck out a record 382 batters in one season, and posted the lowest earned-run average m the National League for four years in a row. “Sandy Koufax is the only pitcher in baseball I would pay to see warm up,” Minnesota Manager Sam Mele said before the start of last week’s World Series. By the time the Series was over, Mele was wishing that he would never see Sandy again.

The Twins beat Koufax in the second game—although he allowed only two runs. In the fifth game, Minnesota was lucky even to get a hit. Sandy retired twelve in a row before Harmon Killebrew dumped a soft liner into centerfield that Willie Davis misjudged and dropped. The scorers ruled it a hit, and everybody in Dodger Stadium groaned with anguish—everybody except Sandy Koufax. “Nice try, Willie,” he yelled, with a big smile on his face.

Not Even a Picture. Just because a man does his job better than anybody else doesn’t mean that he has to take it seriously—or even like it. Sandy Koufax, born Sanford Brown in Brooklyn ? years ago, picked baseball mostly because it seemed easier than being an architect—which is what he first wanted to be. His stepfather, Irving Koufax, is a lawyer, and his mother is an accountant, and they were more than a little taken aback when Sandy decided to spend his life throwing a ball around. To this day, baseball is never discussed in the Koufax household.

All of which suits Sandy fine. Alone among ballplayers, Koufax is an anti-athlete who suffers so little from pride that he does not even possess a photograph of himself. TV and radio interviewers have learned to be careful with personal questions—or risk a string of billingsgate designed to ruin their tapes. One Los Angeles sportswriter had to spend two years buttering Sandy up before he got permission to take photographs of his Studio City, Calif., home Last year, when the Union Oil Co. sent him a questionnaire for its baseball booklet, Koufax reacted with typical taciturnity. “Any off-season jobs, work with youngsters, public relations?” the questionnaire asked. Wrote Koufax: “No.” “Did your father, brother work out with you?” “No.” “Anything else you’d like to tell us?” “No.”

Sandy’s reserve carries over into his dress (mostly blues, greys and blacks), his carefully modulated speech, even his taste in cars. In 1963, when he was awarded a Corvette as a prize for being the most valuable player in the World Series, Koufax called up a friend and sighed: “It’s a toy—but what the hell.” He is rarely seen in the Sunset Strip nightspots, hates the telephone so much that he used to hide it in the oven He even refuses to hire an answering service because that would mean calling back. “If it’s important,” shrugs Sandy, “they’ll send a letter.”

Who Likes Baseball? To his teammates, even to his few close friends Koufax’s aloofness is often downright annoying. “Imagine,” says Dodger Catcher John Roseboro, “being goodlooking, well-off, single—and still so cool. I know guys who would be raising all kinds of hell on those stakes.” Dodger Vice President Fresco Thompson considers him a heretic. “I don’t think he likes baseball,” mutters Thompson. “What kind of a line is he drawing anyway—between himself and the world, between himself and the team?”

A line of ability, for one thing. Nobody, including Sandy Koufax, had any idea how good he was to become when, as an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Cincinnati, he was spotted playing on a sandlot team. In 1954, Sandy signed a Dodger contract for $6,000 plus a $14,000 bonus. Scout Al Campanis wrote in his memo to Dodger Owner Walter O’Malley: “No. 1, he’s a Brooklyn boy. No. 2, he’s Jewish.” The Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles was still four years away. In the meantime, says General Manager Buzzie Bavasi, “there were many people of the Jewish faith in Brooklyn.” As it turned out, Koufax sold precious few tickets: over the next three seasons, his record was nine wins and ten losses.

Things improved a little after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles: Sandy won eleven games in 1958, and in 1959 he struck out 18 batters in one game to tie a record. But in 1960 Koufax took stock of himself and did not like what he saw. “Suddenly I looked up,” he said, “and I had a few grey hairs—and I finally realized that either I was going to be really successful or I was in the wrong profession. Maybe the problem was that I never had a burning ambition to be a baseball player. If I had, I might have realized sooner just how much work was involved.” In 1961 Sandy knuckled down. From Dodger Coach Joe Becker, he learned to keep his right shoulder “open”—away from the direction of the pitch, to rock forward with each pitch, to hide his left hand in his glove to avoid exposing the ball while he was winding up. That seemed to be all there was to it. Practically overnight, Koufax became the best pitcher in baseball.

A Beard & a Fastball. Maybe it was too easy, too fast. By last week Koufax could not even get excited over the double challenge of pitching the deciding game of the World Series with only two days of rest. “I’ll volunteer,” he said, “if I get asked.” Naturally , he got asked. It was supposed to be Don Drysdale’s turn to pitch. Drysdale was a 23-game winner during the season; he had won a Series game, and he was rested. But when the game started, there was Koufax out on the mound. At the start, his curve was hanging, his fastball was erratic. He walked two men in the first inning, and Freon horns tooted triumphantly in Minnesota’s Metropolitan Stadium as Drysdale began warming up in the bullpen.

Koufax struck out Earl Battey to end the threat—and that was as close as the Minnesota Twins got to scoring a run. The Dodgers picked up two runs in the fourth on Lou Johnson’s homer, a double by Ron Fairly and a single by Wes Parker. Koufax needed only one. Relying almost exclusively on his fastball (“It got so I just told Johnny Roseboro ‘no’ every time he called for the curve”), he burned pitch after pitch over the corners of the plate.

Cutting the Corners. Finally, it was the last of the ninth. With one out, Killebrew slapped a single to left. It was the third hit off Sandy all day and the last. Earl Battey looked at a called third strike, and up came Bob Allison, a dangerous hitter. “He was the tying run,” Koufax said later, “so no pitch I threw him got any more than an inch of the plate.” The count went to two and two. Rearing back, Koufax threw. Allison swung. Pop! The ball slammed into Catcher Roseboro’s mitt. In the locker room, world champions for the third time in seven years, richer by $10,000 per man, the Dodgers showered in champagne and gawked like schoolboys at Sandy Koufax, standing off to one side talking to reporters. “That Koufax,” sighed Pitcher Johnny Podres, once a World Series hero himself, “he’s something else.”

He sure is. “Was this your biggest victory?” somebody wanted to know. “No,” said Sandy, “my first victory in the big leagues was.” Well, surely he was just the teeniest bit excited? “No,” said Koufax. “I’m just glad I don’t have to do this again for four whole months.”