February 16, 2008 No comments

2-16-08 - The Magic of Dodgertown

I have been a Dodger fan for over 45 years and have made countless pilgrimages to Dodgertown, but maybe the most memorable was in 1985 or 1986 (I can’t remember for sure). That was the year when you could see a certain lefthander with a high leg kick and distinctive “over-the-top delivery” begin to throw on one of the back diamonds - often by himself, often early in the morning, and as people gathered he would leave as quietly as he came. One could see that he threw with great discomfort in the beginning, but after a couple of weeks, the delivery was smooth, natural, and the speed on his fastball was noticeably improving. Word quickly spread around Dodgertown that a Dodger legend who had not pitched in 20 years due to immense pain in his golden left arm was throwing again. Yeah, but he’s 50. So what’s the big deal? The big deal was that before the end of Spring Training that year, scouts allegedly clocked Sandy Koufax at 90 MPH on the radar gun - at age 50 - after not pitching for 20 years! THAT’S A REAL BIG DEAL! The lefthander could still bring it! I remember that like it was yesterday. Throwing 90 MPH at age 50 is amazing to me! When I was in my 20’s I was clocked at 97 MPH and at age 54 I am in pretty good shape - I still excel at softball, tennis and ping-pong (yes, ping-pong) and can hit a golf ball 320+ yards, but after years of shoulder troubles, you could offer me $100 million dollars if I could throw a baseball 60 MPH and I couldn’t do it. Koufax was/is a freak! He could probably still throw 80 MPH at 72 years old.

I remember Garvey, Lopes, Russell and Cey taking infield practice for hours. I can still see that portly lefthander who talked non-stop throwing batting practice in his late 60’s and feeling like a kid again - Tom Lasorda is one of a kind. I will remember this as his last season in Dodgertown. I remember chatting with Sweet Lou, Maury, Vin, Rick Monday, Carl Erskine, Don Newcombe, Fay Vincent, Al Campanis and other old-timers. I remember that nearly every year, you would hear “Koufax is here” only to see him vanish as quickly as he entered - I called it the ghost of Koufax.

As I walk about the place they call “Dodgertown,” I swear that I can hear the voices of the ghosts of the Walters, Jackie, Jim Gilliam, Campy and Don Drysdale under the warm Florida sun. I do know that Dodgertown is hallowed ground and that I will make my final pilgrmage there next month. My 9 year old son is as excited as I am because of the stories he has heard over the years. He thinks “Forever Dodger Blue” is the greatest song in the world (it is isn’t it?) and that it’s stupid for the Dodgers to leave Dodgertown. He doesn’t know how the facilities have become outdated or understand that attendance is waning due to an antiquated stadium and infrastructure or that the Dodgers fan base is largely on the West Coast now. Me? I understand the business side of the decision - it had to happen and it was long overdue, but everyone who has spent anytime there knows that even with all its’ warts and blemishes, there will never be another Dodgertown. Even though it is not official, it seems certain that the Dodgers shall never be in Dodgertown, Vero Beach, Florida ever again. I will forever remember this year as the year of the Final Dance in Dodgertown and I shall miss it forever!

Chapter 1 of Sandy Koufax by Jane Leavy:

Three decades after he threw his last pitch, Sandy Koufax was back in uniform at Dodgertown, a rare occurrence given his belief that baseball uniforms do not flatter those of a certain age. This is where he made his debut in the spring of 1955 and Vero Beach is where he has chosen to make his after-baseball home — an odd choice for a man said not to like the game and the attention it brings him. Mornings when he’s in town, he works out in the training room. The clubhouse guys gave him a key. He brings the bagels.

On this particular day in February 1997, he was at Dodgertown for a seminar on sports medicine. He had been recruited by Frank Jobe, the Dodgers’ team physician, to teach an audience of biomechanical experts how to throw a ball. He couldn’t very well say no: he was on Jobe’s operating table at the time. He had torn his rotator cuff falling down the stairs. The Boys of Summers Past are not immune to senior moments.

Thinking of Koufax as clumsy is as disconcerting as the sight of the familiar “32″ confined to this minimalist stage: sitting behind a buntingdraped table in a multipurpose room at what is now known as the Conference Center at Dodgertown. He looked thinner than in memory, thirty pounds less than his playing weight, the legacy of an afterlife as a marathoner. The old baggy uniforms always made him look less imposing than he was. His hair was thinner too, but silver, not gray. He had the appearance of a man aging as well as one possibly can, somehow managing to look graceful in uniform while perched beside a droopy fern.

In 1955, Dodgertown was a baseball plantation with diamonds that disappeared into the orange groves on the horizon. No one could have envisioned then the industry that baseball would become; the science that throwing would become; or the pitcher Koufax would become. A pitcher so sublime, people remember always the first time they saw him — among them fellow lecturers Duke Snider and Dave Wallace. What Wallace, a baseball man, recalls most is leaving the stadium convinced: “The ball comes out of his hand different from anybody else’s.”

His virtuosity was a synthesis of physiognomy and physical imagination. He didn’t just dominate hitters or games. He dominated the ball. He could make it do things: rise, break, sing. Gene Mauch, the old Phillies skipper, was once asked if Koufax was the best lefty he ever saw. Mauch replied: “The best righty, too.” As Billy Williams, the Hall of Famer, put it: “There was a different tone when people talked about Sandy Koufax.”

Hank Aaron was his toughest out: “You talk about the Gibsons and the Drysdales and the Spahns. And as good as those guys were, Koufax was a step ahead of them. No matter who he pitched against, he could always be a little bit better. If somebody pitched a one-hitter, he could pitch a no-hitter.”

John Roseboro was his favorite receiver: “I think God came down and tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Boy, I’m gonna make you a pitcher.’ God only made one of him.”

He was an artist who inspired ballplayers to reach beyond their usual idiom for metaphor and simile. They called him the game’s Cary Grant and Fred Astaire and compared him to the Mona Lisa and the David. “He looked like Michelangelo,” Ernie Banks said. “Pitching, walking, what ever he did was kind of in rhythm with life, stylish.” Sometimes one analogy did not suffice. As Koufax’s teammate, the noted art historian Lou Johnson, said, “He was Michelangelo and Picasso rolled into one.”

Absent the radar guns and computer-generated technology of the late twentieth century, which turned acts of grace into biomechanical models, he was admired rather than analyzed. His fastball remains elegantly understated, unmeasurable, unknowable. His curveball lives on in grainy television footage and in the memory of the unfortunates who tried to hit it. There are those, romantics and catchers, content to leave it at that — Roseboro among them: “That SOB was unusual. There’s never been another like him and I don’t think there ever will be. Trying to explain how he throws, how he got his control, how he thinks — he was just un-fucking-usual. Who gives a shit how he threw it?”

Koufax cared. Long after he retired, he became a roving pitching coach in the Dodgers’ minor league system and a stealth advisor to an ardent cadre of pitchers, coaches, and managers who quote him like a shaman — Sandy says! — and then get in line for his autograph just like everyone else. He didn’t want them to do what he said because Sandy Koufax said, “Do it.” He wanted them to understand why it worked.

He had come to see his body as a system for the delivery of stored energy, intuiting the principles of physics inherent in the pitching motion. This realization not only put him ahead of batters, it put him ahead of science. It would take decades for the gurus of biotech medicine to catch up. Later, when he had the time, he visited their labs and delved into their textbooks seeking proofs for what he knew empirically to be true. He learned to break down the pitching motion into its component parts and to put the science of motion into accessible language. He improvised drills using a bag of balls and a chain-link fence, giving impromptu clinics in the parking lot of Bobby’s Restaurant in Vero Beach. He held whole pitching staffs in thrall with his knowledge — sitting, as John Franco of the Mets put it, “bright-eyed at his feet in the middle of the locker room like little boy scouts.”

His face changes when he talks about pitching. His eyes light up, his grammar comes alive …