The Left Arm of God
"Sure, it's hard to say goodbye to pitching," said Koufax, "especially when it's maybe the only thing in your life you'll ever be good at."
Twenty-five and wet behind the ears, I had the honor of interviewing Sandy Koufax in May, 1980 for my first and only cover story for The New York Times Magazine. “The Pitcher’s Game” was about the trials and pleasures of being a major-league pitcher. Published on June 15, 1980, it was not a great article. It was long: some 8,000 words, for which I was paid $750, then the standard fee for a first-time writer for the Magazine. I chose to organize the story around a single game pitched by the New York Yankees’ Ron Guidry, then at his stellar peak. Louisiana Lightning sat patiently for two 90-minute interviews. Three, actually; when I realized, to my agony, that I’d forgotten to hit “record” on my tape player, Guidry, ever the southern gentleman, sat back down for another go-round. I spoke to many other of the day’s top hurlers, including Jim Palmer and the late Tom Seaver, Mike Flanagan, and J.R. Richard. I talked to a few hitters, too: the great George Brett, for instance. Taking his cuts outside the batting cage, Brett said with a wry smile, “Pitchers? I hate ‘em all.”
I especially wanted to check in with Koufax, who, to someone who grew up when I did, was and remains pitching’s gold standard; whose story, moreover, combines triumph with what Koufax, for one, never considered anything like tragedy. That would have struck so modest a man as grossly presumptuous.
Koufax and I only spoke for some ten minutes; a puppy doesn’t snap at the heels of a god. The audio of essentially the entire interview is below.
As a high-schooler in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, Sandy focused on hoops. He could dunk at 6’2” and averaged 16.5 points a game as a senior at Lafayette High School. He never played in the minors, but went straight into the bigs at 19. It was 1955; the Dodgers left for L.A. in ‘58. Sandy had played very little baseball, barely knew the rules, and spent his first six years overcoming inconsistency and wildness and learning how to hold a baserunner on. Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella took up his case; the problem, they complained to the Dodgers’ manager, Walter Alston, was that Alston wasn’t giving the kid enough playing time. (Sandy went 2-2 in his rookie year and 2-4 in 1956.) Robinson and Campanella, no strangers to bigotry, also tried to shield Koufax, a Jew, from his teammates’ ugly barbs.
After going 8-13 in 1960, a dejected Koufax considered quitting. But not only would 1960 be his last losing season; from 1961 to 1966, he was easily the dominant pitcher of his day, arguably the greatest of all time. Koufax was baseball’s Achilles: six glorious years and that was it, his Achilles heel his left elbow, whose traumatic arthritis forced him out of the game at age 30. “If somebody could’ve told me how long I had until I did permanent damage,” he told me, “I would have pitched until the day before. But I didn’t know what I’d be trading, for what.” Today, Koufax’s elbow would probably be operated on; forty-five years ago, surgeons were unwilling to take what in those still-primitive days of sports medicine was considered too great a risk.
Yet Sandy was also baseball’s Edith Piaf, able to walk away from the game in the spirit of Piaf’s theme song, “Non, je ne regrette rien.” “My life has been good,” Koufax said. “I had a good time playing, I played for twelve years, there are a lot of people who never got the chance I had. I really don’t have any complaints.”
The voice of reason, Candlestick Park, San Francisco, 1965: In one of baseball’s legendary flare-ups, the Giants’ great but hot-tempered pitcher Juan Marichal tried to take Dodgers catcher John Roseboro’s head off with his bat. Without thinking twice, Koufax raced off the mound to intercede (while keeping one eye on that bat).
Below are some of Koufax’s stats, followed by our phone conversation. Without full awareness of their historic context, it’s hard to fully appreciate his numbers’ significance. When he won his three Cy Young Awards, only one award was given for both leagues. He was the first pitcher to throw four no-hitters (including a perfect game), and the first to average more than nine strikeouts per nine innings. His curveball was as feared as his fastball (the Dodgers’ announcer, Vin Scully, called Sandy’s curve “a twelve-to-six curveball,” ie. it started at 12 o'clock and dropped to 6). His fastball is said to have reached 100 mph (radar guns were not yet in use) at a time when not many, if any, pitchers threw that fast. The youngest player ever inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, at 36, Koufax is one of only four pitchers in the Hall to have won fewer than 200 games. They didn’t give him enough time. And lest I forget, those of us of a certain age recall that Sandy insisted on sitting out Game 1 of the ‘65 Series. It was Yom Kippur.
"The only thing you'll ever be good at." What a curse. It's easy to transfer that thought to one's own life and then realize how alone that can leave you.