Pitcher perfect

Sandy Koufax overcame constant, seating pain to become the greatest pitcher of his time

After Sandy Koufax mastered his remarkable fastball, the lefthander enjoyed a five-year stretch that was perhaps the most dominating of any pitcher in baseball history. Between 1962 and '66, Koufax went 111-34, led the league in ERA each season, pitched four no-hitters -- including a perfect game in 1965 -- and won three Cy Young Awards. But traumatic arthritis in his left elbow threatened to leave him permanently disabled, and Koufax retired after the 1966 season, at the age of 30. The following is an excerpt from Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, a biography by Jane Leavy that will be published by HarperCollins on Sept. 17. A more comprehensive excerpt, that discusses Koufax's often difficult early years with the Dodgers, is featured in this week's Sports Illustrated. Click here for a Koufax photo gallery.

When Sandy Koufax was a rookie, there was no such thing as sports medicine. You didn't rehab injuries. You lived with them, grew old with them. Ice was for martinis, not elbows. Koufax and the Dodgers trainers understood the paradox of his build-that which made him special also made him vulnerable. "Doc" Anderson, who worked on him for an hour and a half before every start, told reporters Koufax had "extreme" muscles, "the largest I ever worked on, and that includes Ted Kluszewski and Frank Howard. Muscles like that aren't ideal for a pitcher, but then I've always said that Sandy Koufax wasn't built to be a pitcher."

Every pitching arm is doomed. Soft tissue and bone can only give so much. The first intimations of his arm's mortality surfaced on Aug. 8, 1964, in Milwaukee. That night Koufax won his 17th game and became the first National League pitcher in the modern era to strike out 200 hitters in four consecutive seasons. He also singled and scored to begin the winning rally. Reaching base proved costly, however. He jammed his pitching arm diving back into second to beat a pickoff throw.

The morning papers made no mention of it. The big news was that he was experimenting with a new pitch, a forkball. He won his next two starts and was leading the league with a 19-5 record. But the morning after his 19th win, a shutout in which he fanned 13, he couldn't straighten his arm. The elbow joint made a squishing sound, and pockets of fluid protruded like hard-boiled eggs beneath the skin. His elbow was as big as his knee. The only difference was that his knee bent. He had to drag his arm out of bed like a log.

Tests were run; X-rays were ordered. Dr. Robert Kerlan, the noted orthopedic surgeon, took one look at the film and pronounced the bad news: traumatic arthritis. A diagnosis without a cure. Arthritis is an acute inflammation of a joint usually associated with old age. Pitch by pitch, season by season, the cartilage in his elbow was breaking down. Koufax's arm was old even if he wasn't.

Kerlan knew the long-term prospects weren't good. Pitching is trauma. The human elbow may be one of God's great inventions, but He didn't anticipate a major league fastball during those first seven days. The moment of maximum stress occurs just as a pitcher cocks his arm and begins to accelerate it forward. In that instant the elbow is subjected to what doctors call "maximum load," as two contrary forces, momentum and inertia, converge on the joint. It causes ligaments to stretch like salt-water taffy on a hot summer day.

Today arthroscopic surgery on elbows and knees allows professional athletes and middle-aged golfers like Koufax to return to competition in a fraction of the time they once needed to recover. Dr. Frank Jobe, Kerlan's partner, performed the first elbow reconstruction in 1974, less than a decade after Koufax retired. Tommy John, the surgical pioneer, returned to baseball and pitched for another 12 years. Jobe says, "If you had said to Dr. Kerlan, 'Why does [Koufax's] arm hurt?' he'd say, 'Because he throws so hard.' That's true. What he didn't know was that [Koufax] threw hard enough to stretch a ligament. It wasn't torn, but it was stretched enough to allow two bony surfaces to rub together. It must have just killed him."

Koufax always scoffs at such reports. "My heroism is greatly overstated," he'll say. On occasion he's been known to admit, "Maybe I just didn't want to think about how bad it was."

March is the cruelest month for pitchers, when rested arms renew the annual struggle for controlled velocity. Today pitch counts and early outings are meticulously monitored. Pitching a complete game in spring training is unthinkable, even without an arthritic arm. But on March 30, 1965, Koufax did just that. The next morning his roommate, infielder Dick Tracewski, was at the sink shaving when Koufax walked in. "He says, 'Look at this.' The elbow was black. And it was swollen. From the elbow to the armpit it looked like a bruise. It was a black, angry hemorrhage. It was an angry arm, an angry elbow. And all he says is, 'Roomie, look at this.'"

Quickly but quietly, Koufax returned to Los Angeles to see Kerlan, who told him he'd be lucky to pitch once a week. Eventually, and irrevocably, he would lose full use of his arm. Koufax told the doctor, "I'm trusting you to keep me going. I'm also going to trust you to say when you think I should quit."

They mapped out a schedule for the '65 season that called for Koufax to pitch every five days, which would have meant starting only 34 games instead of his usual 41. Koufax promised Kerlan he'd quit throwing between starts, no small concession for a man who routinely dragged Tracewski out of bed in the middle of the night in order to go throw.

Palliatives and temporizing were all medicine had to offer: cortisone shots in the joint, Empirin with codeine for the pain (which he took every night and sometimes during the fifth inning) and Butazolidin, an anti-inflammatory drug prescribed for broken-down thoroughbreds, so poisonous to humans that its use by them has been prohibited since the '70s. It had one major side effect. "It killed a few people," Jobe said.

Koufax didn't think twice. He rejoined the Dodgers in Washington, D.C., where they were scheduled to play an exhibition game against the Senators. He made headlines tossing a ball on the sidelines. SANDY PLAYS CATCH! one read the next day. He was wondered at and wondered about. No one knew what to expect, least of all him. He pitched three innings in his first outing the next day, striking out five of the 10 men he faced. Doug Camilli, his old catcher, was the last of them. He popped up. "Sore arm, my eye," Camilli yelled as he trotted back to the Senators dugout. Koufax regularly used a salve called Capsolin, derived from red hot chili peppers grown in China, to mask his pain. Players called it the "atomic balm" -- thick, gooey stuff, which is no longer marketed in the United States. Most pitchers diluted it with cold cream or Vaseline. Koufax used it straight, gobs of it. Nobe Kawano, the Dodgers' accommodating clubhouse man, always made sure he washed Koufax's laundry separately, but once, when the Dodgers donated used jerseys to a local Little League team, the lucky kid who got number 32 ran off the field screaming, "I'm on fire." He wasn't the only one. Lou Johnson wore one of Koufax's sweatshirts one cold night in Pittsburgh. First he began to sweat. Then his skin blistered. Then he threw up.

If heat was Koufax's salve, ice was his salvation. They didn't have ice packs then; they just plunged your arm in a bucket of ice and waited for frostbite to set in. Trainers fashioned a rubber sleeve for him out of an inner tube -- the height of medical technology -- later donated to the Hall of Fame.

Who could have predicted that by season's end he would pitch 335 2/3 innings and set a major league record by striking out 382 men (an average of 10.25 per game)? He never missed a turn.

Issue date: September 9, 2002

 

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