Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (17 page)

Koufax didn’t tell anyone else, and he made Collier promise not to write the story. So they shared that little secret throughout the 1966 season. When the Dodgers went to Atlanta, Collier whispered to Koufax, “Last time here for you.” And that is exactly how Koufax pitched that season, as if he would never pass this way again. He won a career-high 27 games, pushing his record in his final six seasons to 129–47. He was 11–3 in his career in 1–0 games. In 1965 and ’66 he was 53–17 for the club that scored fewer runs than all but two National League teams.

“He’s the greatest pitcher I ever saw,” says Hall of Famer Ernie Banks. “I can still see that big curveball. It had a great arc on it, and he never bounced it in the dirt. Sandy’s curve had a lot more spin than anybody else’s—it spun like a fastball coming out of his hand—and he had the fastball of a pure strikeout pitcher. It jumped up at the end. The batter would swing half a foot under it. Most of the time we knew what was coming, because he held his hands closer to his head when he threw a curveball, but it didn’t matter. Even though he was tipping off his pitches, you still couldn’t hit him.”

Koufax was so good, he once taped a postgame radio show with Vin Scully
before
the game. He was so good, the relief pitchers treated the night before his starts the way a sailor treats shore leave. On one rare occasion in which Koufax struggled to go his usual nine innings—he averaged 7.64 per start from ’61 to ’66—manager Walter Alston visited his pitcher while a hungover Bob Miller warmed in the bullpen.

“How do you feel, Sandy?” Alston asked.

“I’ll be honest with you, Skip,” Koufax said. “I feel a hell of a lot better than the guy you’ve got warming up.”

On Nov. 17, 1966, Collier came home from watching the Ice Capades and was greeted with this message from his babysitter: “Mr. Koufax has been trying to call you for a couple of hours.” Collier knew exactly what it was about. He called Koufax.

“I’m calling the wire services in the morning,” Koufax told him. “Is there anything you need from me now?”

“Sandy,” Collier said, “I wrote that story months ago. It’s in my desk drawer. All I have to do is make a call and tell them to run it.”

Says Collier, “It was the biggest story I’ll ever write. They ran it across the top of Page One with a big headline like it was the end of World War II.”

I HAVE GOTTEN ahold of Koufax’s home telephone number in Vero Beach, but I do not dare dial it. Even from afar I can feel the strength of this force field he has put around himself. To puncture it with a surprise phone call means certain disaster. I have read that Koufax so hated the intrusions of the telephone during his playing days that he once took to stashing it in his oven. Buzzie Bavasi, the Dodgers’ general manager, would have to send telegrams to his house saying, “Please call.”

I don’t call. I am an archeologist—dig I must, but with the delicate touch of brushes and hand tools. I enlist the help of Koufax’s friends. Now I understand why people I talk to about Koufax are apprehensive. They ask, Does Sandy know you’re doing this story? (Yes.) It’s as if speaking about him is itself a violation of his code of honor.

There is a 58-year-old health-care worker in Port Chester, N.Y., named David Saks who attended Camp Chi-Wan-Da in Kingston, N.Y., in the summer of 1954. Koufax, who is from Brooklyn, was his counselor. “He was this handsome, strapping guy, a great athlete who had professional scouts trying to sign him,” Saks says. “I was 13. He was 18. We all were in awe of him. But even then there were signs that he wanted people to avoid fussing about him to the nth degree.”

Saks needed a day to think before agreeing to share two photographs he has from Camp Chi-Wan-Da that include the teenage Koufax. “Knowing how he is…,” Saks explains. Saks has neither seen nor spoken to Koufax in 45 years. He does, however, have recurring dreams about happy reunions with him.

In Vero Beach, where Koufax spends much of his time now, the townsfolk choose not to speak his name when they come upon him in public. They will say, “Hello, Mr. K.,” when they run into him at the post office or, “Hello, my good friend,” rather than tip off a tourist and risk creating one of those moments Koufax detests.

“Sandy has a quiet, productive way about him,” says Garagiola, president of the Baseball Assistance Team (BAT), a charity that helps former players in medical or financial straits. Garagiola sometimes calls Koufax to ask him to speak with former players who are particularly hurting. “He can’t really understand that,” Garagiola says. “He’s got a great streak of modesty. He’ll say, ‘What do they want to talk to me for?’ He is a Hall of Famer in every way. He’ll make an impact. You won’t know it and I won’t know it, but the guy he’s helping will know it. Above anything else, I’ll remember him for his feelings for fellow players.”

There was an outfielder named Jim Barbieri who joined the Dodgers during the 1966 pennant race. He was so nervous that he would talk to himself in the shower, and the pressure so knotted his stomach that he once threw up in the locker room. One day Koufax motioned toward Barbieri in the dugout and said to Fairly, “I have a responsibility to guys like him. If I pitch well from here on out, I can double that man’s income.” Koufax, who was referring to World Series bonus money, went 8–2 the rest of the season. From 1963 to ’66 he was 14–2 in September, with a 1.55 ERA.

Earlier in that 1966 season a television network offered Koufax $25,000 to allow their cameras to trail him on and off the field. Koufax said he would do it for $35,000, and only if that money was divided so that every Dodgers player, coach and trainer received $1,000.

Koufax attends Garagiola’s BAT dinner in New York City every winter, and always draws the biggest crowd among the many Hall of Famers who sign autographs during the cocktail hour. “I grew up in Brooklyn,” says Lester Marks of Ernst and Young, which secured the Koufax table this year. “I went to Ebbets Field all the time. I’m 52. I thought seeing Sandy Koufax pitch was the thrill of a lifetime, but meeting him as an adult was an even bigger thrill. My guests were shocked at what a down-to-earth gentleman he is.”

After this year’s dinner I walked through the crowded ballroom toward Koufax’s table, only to see him hustle to a secured area on the dais. He posed for pictures with the Toms River, N.J., Little League world champions. Then he was gone, this time for a night of refreshments in Manhattan with pitcher Al Leiter, as close to a protégé as Koufax has in baseball.

I should mention that I did meet Sandy Koufax a few years ago, before I embarked on this quest to find out what makes him run. I was at Dodgertown, standing next to the row of six pitching mounds adjacent to the Dodgers’ clubhouse. “Sacred ground,” as former Dodgers pitcher Claude Osteen calls it, seeing as it was here that Branch Rickey hung his famous strings, forming the borders of a strike zone at which every Dodgers pitcher from Don Newcombe to Koufax to Sutton to Orel Hershiser took aim. (Koufax was so wild as a rookie that pitching coach Joe Becker took him to a mound behind the clubhouse so he would not embarrass himself in front of teammates and fans.) Tan and lean, Koufax looked as if he had just come in from the boardwalk to watch the Los Angeles pitchers throw. He was dressed in sandals, a short pair of shorts and a polo shirt. I said something to him about the extinction of the high strike. Koufax said that he hadn’t needed to have that pitch called a strike in order to get batters to swing at his high heater. When I followed up with a question about whether baseball should enforce the high strike in today’s strike zone, Koufax’s face tightened. I could almost hear the alarms sounding in his head, his warning system announcing, This is an interview! He smiled in a polite but pained way and said in almost a whisper, “I’d rather not,” and walked away.

When chatty reporters aren’t around, that lonely pedestal called a pitching mound still gives Koufax great pleasure. He is the James Bond of pitching coaches. His work is quick, clean, stylish in its understatement and usually done in top-secret fashion. He has tutored Cleveland’s Dwight Gooden and L.A.’s Chan Ho Park on their curveballs and Houston’s Mike Hampton on his confidence; convinced L.A.’s Kevin Brown that it was O.K. to lead his delivery with his butt; and taught former Dodger Hershiser to push off the rubber with the ball of his foot on the dirt and the heel of his foot on the rubber. Hershiser removed some spikes from the back of his right shoe so that he could be more comfortable with Koufax’s style of pushing off.

Koufax has tried since 1982 to teach his curveball technique to Mets closer John Franco. “I can’t do it,” Franco says. “My fingers aren’t big enough to get that kind of snap.” Koufax was God’s template for a pitcher: a prizefighter’s back muscles for strength, long arms for leverage and long fingers for extra spin on his fastball and curveball. The baseball was as low as the top of his left ankle when he reached back to throw in that last calm moment of his delivery—like a freight train cresting a hill—just before he flung the weight and force of his body toward the plate.

His overhand curveball was vicious because his long fingers allowed him to spin the ball faster than anybody else. Most pitchers use their thumb to generate spin, pushing with it from the bottom of the ball and up the back side. Koufax could place his thumb on the top of the ball, as a guide—similar to the way a basketball player shooting a jumper uses his off-hand on the side of the ball—because his long fingers did all the work, pulling down on the baseball with a wicked snap. On the days he wasn’t pitching Koufax liked to hold a ball with his fastball and curveball grips because he believed it would strengthen the muscles and tendons in his left hand by just the tiniest bit.

Koufax may be the best pitching coach alive, though he wants no part of that job’s high visibility or demands on his time. He cannot be pinned down any easier than a tuft of a dandelion blown free by the wind. After quitting NBC in February 1973, Koufax didn’t take another job until 1979, when he explained that his return to the Dodgers as a roving minor league pitching coach was partly due to financial concerns. Koufax pitched 12 years in the majors and made only $430,500 in salary. He has steadfastly rejected endorsement offers and supplements his income with perhaps two card shows a year.

In the ’80s Koufax enjoyed staying under the big league radar by doing his coaching for the Dodgers at the minor league level, in places such as San Antonio, Albuquerque and Great Falls, Mont., where he liked to stay up late talking pitching with the players and staff. He likes helping young players. In Great Falls he saw the potential of a righthander the organization was down on for being too hot-tempered. “He’s got the best arm on the staff,” Koufax said. “Stay with this guy.” He was right about John Wetteland, the Rangers’ closer, now in his 11th season as one of the most reliable short relievers in baseball.

Koufax abruptly quit the Dodgers in February 1990. O’Malley had thought he was doing Koufax a favor by ordering the farm director to cut back on Koufax’s assignments in 1989, but Koufax told O’Malley, “I just don’t think I’m earning what you’re paying me.” He also was ticked off when one of the Dodgers bean counters bounced back an expense report to him over a trivial matter. Since then Koufax has worked on an ad hoc basis, ready to help his friends. Fox baseball analyst Kevin Kennedy, who carries a handwritten note from Koufax in his wallet, invited him to spring training in 1993 when Kennedy was managing the Rangers. Koufax stayed one week, insisting that he wear an unmarked jersey with a plain blue cap rather than the team’s official uniform. “He really enjoyed it,” says Osteen, who was Kennedy’s pitching coach. “Every night we’d go out to dinner and just talk baseball deep into the night. At the end of the week he said, ‘You know, I’ve really had a good time.’ I was floored. For him to acknowledge how he felt was a major, major thing. Believe me. I could tell he had missed the game. But at the same time, after a week of it he was ready to go back to his own life. One week was enough.”

Last year Koufax visited the Mets’ camp in Port St. Lucie, Fla., as a favor to owner Fred Wilpon, a former teammate at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, and Dave Wallace, the Mets’ pitching coach who befriended Koufax when Wallace was working in the Dodgers’ minor league system. Koufax sat in front of the row of lockers assigned to the Mets’ pitchers and began talking. A crowd grew, pulling into a tight circle like Boy Scouts around a campfire. Koufax looked at Leiter—also a lefthander—and said, “Al, you’ve had a nice career. Pitched in the World Series. But you can be better.”

“I know,” Leiter said. “Can you help me?”

Koufax liked that. He showed Leiter how he used to push off the rubber. He asked Leiter about where he aimed a certain pitch, and when Leiter said, “I’m thinking outer half—” Koufax cut him off. “Stop!” he said. “You never think outer half. You think a spot on the outside corner. Think about throwing the ball through the back corner of the plate, not to it.”

What Koufax stressed most was that Leiter needed to pitch away more to righthanded hitters. Koufax lived on fastballs on the outside corner. Leiter, who says that many hitters today dive into the ball, prefers to pound cut fastballs on their fists. But Koufax showed Leiter how to make the ball run away from righthanders by changing the landing spot of his right foot by one inch and by letting his fingers come off slightly to the inside half of the ball. And Koufax shared the lesson that saved his career, the lesson it took him six years in the big leagues to learn: A fastball will behave better, with just as much life and better control, if you throttle back a little. “Taking the grunt out of it,” is how Koufax put it.

In 1961 Koufax was a career 36–40 pitcher with awful control problems. He was scheduled to throw five innings in the Dodgers spring training B game against the Twins in Orlando, but the other pitcher missed the flight, and Koufax said he’d try to go seven. His catcher and roommate, Norm Sherry, urged him to ease up slightly on his fastball, throw his curve and hit his spots. Koufax had nothing to lose; manager Walter Alston and the front office were at the A game. Cue the chorus of angels and dramatic lighting. Koufax got it. He threw seven no-hit innings and, as he wrote in his book, “I came home a different pitcher from the one who had left.”