Baseball: Champions on the Loose

A right. A left. Another right. The Bad Guy was giving Tony Curtis his lumps in a TV rerun of a forgettable flick called Flesh and Fury. Anybody could see that it was not over yet: Tony’s curls were still neatly combed. Bravely, he rose from the floor to smite his opponent a mighty clout on the mandible — and cheers rang through the Los Angeles Dodgers’ clubhouse at Chavez Ravine.

“Stick it in his ear!” shouted Pitcher Johnny Podres.

“Uppercut! Uppercut!” cried Catcher John Roseboro.

“Yeah! Yeah!” screamed the Dodgers in unison as Tony floored his man.

This just had to be the loosest team in baseball. There they were, smack in the middle of one of the tightest pennant races in National League history, leading the league by 1½ games with four games still to play. Up in San Francisco, the second-place Giants had already beaten the Cincinnati Reds 5-3. In 15 minutes, the Dodgers were due on the field to take on the tough Milwaukee Braves. And what were they doing? Sitting around a TV set.

No-Hit Homers. They had reason to feel safe. The only way they could lose the pennant would be to wake up. The only man on the club who was batting as high as .290 was a pitcher, and the team’s top slugger had hit only 12 home runs all year. (Not counting “Dodger homers,” in which, as explained last week by Shortstop Maury Wills: “I get a base on balls, take second on a sacri fice, steal third, and come home on a fly ball.”) But just the night before, the Dodgers had won their twelfth straight game, as Sandy Koufax shut out Cincinnati on two hits, 5-0, running his own season’s record to 25-8 and recording his 369th strikeout—a major league record. Now it was Don Drysdale’s turn, and Don quickly made it 13 in a row, throwing only 89 pitches, blanking the Milwaukee Braves on three hits, 4-0 for his 23rd victory of the year.

For a while, the way their pitchers were going, it looked as though the Dodgers would never lose a game. Then they did just that, 2-0, to Milwaukee.The Giants lost too, and next day Sandy Koufax clinched the pennant, beating the Braves 4-1 and getting his name in the record book still another time—by tying the modern National League record for victories in one season (26) by a lefthander. The Braves’ lone run was actually an achievement of sorts: it was the first scored off Koufax in his last six victories. In 78 innings, Los Angeles pitchers had allowed only four earned runs; the combined earned-run average of the Dodgers’ pitching staff was a gaudy 2.84.

Never on Holidays. By contrast, their World Series opponents, the American League’s Minnesota Twins, boast only one pitcher who has even won 20 games, Jim (“Mudcat”) Grant—and his earned-run average is a so-so 3.22. The Twins do have plenty of power: Harmon Killebrew has hit 24 homers, Bob Allison has 23, and Tony Oliva, the American League batting champion (at .321) has 16. What’s more, because of a quirk in the schedule, the Twins won’t have to face Sandy Koufax in the opening game of the Series on Oct. 6.

That day is Yom Kippur, and Sandy never plays baseball on Jewish holidays. But there is always Drysdale—and out in Las Vegas, oddsmakers made the Dodgers 10-13 favorites to win the World Series.