Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (18 page)

A few weeks after Koufax spoke to the Mets’ staff, an excited Wilpon approached Leiter in the clubhouse and said, “I don’t know what you did with Sandy, but he wants you to have his home number. I’ve never known him to do this before with any player. If you ever want to talk with him, just give him a call.”

Leiter says he rang the dial-a-legend line three or four times. “I wasn’t sure what to do,” he says. “I didn’t want to call so much where he would think I was taking advantage of our friendship. On the other hand, I didn’t want to
not
call, and he’d think, ‘That guy is blowing me off.’ It’s kind of delicate, you know what I mean? But Sandy’s cool. Real cool.” At 32, Leiter had the best season of his career (17–6, 2.47). “I accepted the idea of throwing outside more,” he says. “The times when I did it fairly often were the three or four most dominating games I had all year.”

Koufax likes to slip into Dodgertown during spring training unnoticed, parking in a back lot, visiting with O’Malley if he sees the shades open at Villa 162 and watching pitchers throw on the sacred ground of the practice mounds. He has noticed that there are a lot more microphones and cameras at Dodgertown since Rupert Murdoch bought the team last year. He is not happy about that.

I am chatting with Bobby McCarthy, Koufax’s friend from Vero Beach, during an exhibition game at Dodgertown when Dave Stewart, a former Koufax pupil (who himself coached the pennant-winning Padres pitching staff last year), stops by. “We were talking about Sandy,” McCarthy says.

“Oh, yeah?” Stewart says. “I just saw him in the clubhouse.”

I bolt, but when I get to the clubhouse, the Ghost has vanished. I can practically smell the ethereal contrails.

A few days later I get the official word from a member of Koufax’s inner circle: “He doesn’t want to talk. He’s at the point where he doesn’t care what people write; he just doesn’t want to say anything. Sorry.”

I fire my last bullet. The home phone number. I haven’t needed to muster this kind of courage to dial a telephone since I asked my date to our high school prom. The phone rings. I remember the code: The answering machine is on if he’s in town, off if he’s not. The phone just keeps ringing.

IT IS Opening Day of the 1999 season. I am standing before the house at Winkumpaugh Farm. Or what is left of it. It burned to the ground 22 days ago.

I am staring at a cement hole in the ground filled with ash and garbage and the stump of a chimney. Standing with me is Dean Harrison, a 45-year-old intensive-care nurse who grew up in West Orange, N.J., rooting for Koufax. He bought the property last year and lives in a house farther up the hill. When his power goes out during a winter storm, he calls the utility company and says, “The Koufax line is out.” And they know exactly where the problem is. He knows the history of the place.

Koufax sold Winkumpaugh Farm to Herbert Haynes of Winn, Maine, who sold it three months later to John and Kay Cox of Mare Island, Calif. Cox was an absentee landlord, renting it when he could. Young people used it as a party house. Necessary repairs were left undone. By the time Henderson bought it last fall, Winkumpaugh Farm was in awful shape. “I wanted to save it,” he says. “I was about 30 years too late.” He finally decided to donate the farmhouse to the Ellsworth Fire Department.

When the fire company went out to the house on March 14, patches of ground were showing through what was left of winter’s last snowfall. The first thing the firemen did was grab pieces of Sandy Koufax’s life for themselves. They pulled up floorboards and planks of clapboard siding. A policeman tossed some switch plates, two faucet handles and a small pile of bricks into the back of his squad car.

After this bit of scavenging, the firefighters practiced a few rescues with a controlled fire, then they scattered hay on Winkumpaugh Farm’s old wood floors and torched it. The old place went up quick as kindling, gone before a tear could fall to the snow.

After the fire burned out, Keleshian reached into the smoldering ruin and took some ancient square-headed nails. She also took some of the farmhouse’s charcoaled remains, with which she plans to sketch from memory two drawings of Winkumpaugh Farm—one for Anne and one for Sandy.

The early spring sun holds me in its warmth as it begins to sink behind the mountain beyond the valley. The quiet of North Ellsworth is profound, disturbed only by the gentle whisper of the wind through the pines and the bare branches of the oak, beech, birch and apple trees.

The farmhouse is gone, and yet I see it clearly. I see the weather vane atop the tiny cupola, the second-floor dormers, the screened-in porch and the white sign under the eaves that says WINKUMPAUGH FARM in black letters. I can hear classical music playing through homemade speakers. I can smell dinner wafting through the cozy house. Without the recipe in front of him, Sandy is making his grandmother’s stuffed cabbage. He is surrounded by friends, laughter, the glow of a wood-burning stove and the warmth of walls lined with hardbound books. He is home.

Sandy Koufax always hated it when people described him as a recluse, and I have come to understand how wrong that label is. A recluse doesn’t touch so many people with lifelong lessons of generosity, humility and the Zen of the curveball.

I have rebuilt his farmhouse in my mind, and it is sturdier and more beautiful this way. Why shouldn’t I do the same when taking the measure of the man who once lived there? Must every blank be filled in, leaving us no room to construct parts of him as we wish? What we don’t see can help us keep him forever young, unflinchingly true to himself, forever an inspiration.

Looking at the ruins of Winkumpaugh Farm at my feet, I realize that I no longer need that Vero Beach phone number. I have found Sandy Koufax.

Postscript: Sandy Koufax called me after I wrote this piece but before it ran in SI. We talked for a long time, mostly about college basketball. He politely explained that he did not want to be interviewed or quoted. I was oddly happy about that. I had enjoyed the challenge of finding the essence of a man through the people he touched and the places he had been. Fascinated by his career and impressed by his integrity, I had wanted to write this story for years, and it’s still one of my favorites.

NOVEMBER 29, 1999

One out away from the indignity of a World Series no-hitter
at the hands of the Yankees, the Dodgers sent a little-used
infielder named Cookie Lavagetto to the plate

T
ONIGHT, MY SONS, I WILL TELL YOU MY FAVORITE
bedtime story. It happened back when your grandfather was a young man, before he was a father himself. So, of course, I was not there. But whenever I want to think about the essence of baseball—the equity of its possibilities—I
am
there, inside that little snow globe of a ballpark in Brooklyn, amid the fading light and encroaching shadows of late afternoon on Oct. 3, 1947.

Someday you will learn how a snapshot can capture not just an image but something much larger. A sailor kissing a woman in Times Square. A girl wailing beside a student felled by a National Guardsman’s bullet. A line drive ricocheting off the rightfield wall at Ebbets Field in the fourth game of the 1947 World Series.

This was the first Series to feature a black player, the courageous rookie Jackie Robinson, at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers against the New York Yankees. It was also the first World Series to be televised. Robinson was but one of five future Hall of Famers on the field that day—and one of those was the great DiMaggio, the player whose picture hangs right there above your bed, Adam. But none of them had anything to do with what I am about to tell you. And that is among the many ways in which baseball the fairest of sports.

It was the bottom of the ninth, and Bill Bevens, an otherwise unremarkable Yankees righthander with a 40–36 career record, was one out away from the first no-hitter in World Series history. The Yankees led the game, and the Series, 2–1. Pinch-hitting for Brooklyn with two runners aboard on walks was Cookie Lavagetto, a lifetime .269 hitter who had batted just 69 times that season with only four extra-base hits.

The Yankees could not kill the clock. They could not sit on the ball. The Dodgers could not call timeout. They could not design a play to put the game in the hands of their best player. At its most critical moments, baseball chooses its heroes and goats with the randomness of a carnival barker’s rickety spinning wheel. Where she stops nobody knows.

The strapping Bevens blew his first pitch, a fastball, past Lavagetto. Then, with his 137th and last offering, he tried another. Lavagetto struck a liner that caromed off the rightfield wall and then off the chest of Yankees rightfielder Tommy Henrich, who retrieved the ball and began a vain relay to the plate. By the time Eddie Miksis came home with Brooklyn’s winning run, Bevens was trudging off the field toward the third base dugout, his head bowed in mourning at having been beaten by just one hit, Lavagetto’s double.

I suppose I should mention, almost parenthetically, that the Yankees would go on to win the Series in seven games, that Bevens, 18 days short of his 31st birthday when he threw that final fastball, would never start another major league game, ruined by a sore arm. Lavagetto, finished at 34, would never get another major league hit.

Delirious Brooklyn fans stormed the mottled grass and dusty dirt of Ebbets Field after Lavagetto’s blow. A few of them tore at his shirt, and one snatched the cap from his head. Whenever I picture myself at that game, I am standing along the first base line with a more reverential cluster of fans, many of them topped by brushed wool fedoras, staring in awe at the rightfield wall as big-muscled Buicks and Fords honk like a flock of happy geese down Bedford Avenue on the other side. Many of the fans are pointing to the spot where Lavagetto’s hit clanked off the Burma Shave sign, about 12 feet above the ground, as if, like Thomas probing Jesus’ wounds, to make the miracle real.

My gaze, however, is drawn to the advertisement below that one. It is for a movie starring Danny Kaye. I smile at the perfection of its placement in the composition of this snapshot:
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
. Anything is possible.

Sweet dreams, my boys. Sweet dreams.

Postscript: I chose to write about this game when SI asked its staffers to contribute to a 20th century retrospective called “I Wish I’d Been There.” I intended it to be a valentine not just to baseball, but also to my sons.

MARCH 27, 2000