Strike two

Pitchers and catchers will report to spring training as early as this Tuesday, February 10; the starting date for the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers is next Friday, February 13. That will mark the 60th anniversary of the day when Hall of Fame hurlers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale shocked the baseball world by staging a joint holdout for higher pay.

Koufax, who turned 90 on December 30, and Drysdale, who died in 1993 at 56, were the aces of the 1965 World Series champion Dodgers, teammates since before the once-beloved Bums bolted from Brooklyn in 1958. They formed an ad hoc labor union with a membership of two and held out for almost all of spring training. Their Hall of Fame plaques in Cooperstown cite strikeouts, shutouts, no-hitters, Cy Young Awards, and scoreless inning streaks, but they don’t mention the duo’s unprecedented job action before the 1966 season.

Here’s how it came about:

In 1965, Koufax and Drysdale led the Dodgers to their third World Series victory in the eight seasons since the team moved west. Their salaries that year were $85,000 and $80,000, respectively. With the New York Yankees’ dynasty, which lasted from 1949 to 1964, in sudden decline, the Dodgers looked like the closest thing to baseball’s next empire. It was all based on Koufax’s and Drysdale’s pitching prowess.

How anemic was their offense? Their two leading home run hitters clubbed only 12 each, while Drysdale, in a pitcher’s limited number of at-bats, smashed seven and was the team’s only .300 hitter. When Koufax tossed a perfect game on September 9, 1965, it was the only nine-inning major league contest in which the teams combined for just one hit. The Dodgers’ only run was manufactured on a walk, a sacrifice bunt, a stolen base, and the catcher’s wild throw to third.

Koufax won the Cy Young Award that year. He led all major league hurlers with 26 wins, 382 strikeouts, and an earned run average of 2.04 — the pitchers’ Triple Crown. Drysdale led the league with 42 starts and compiled a 23-12 record with an ERA of 2.77.

When Koufax famously skipped starting the opening game of the 1965 World Series in observance of Yom Kippur, Drysdale gave up seven runs and took the loss. When manager Walter Alston trudged to the mound to pull him out during the six-run third inning, Drysdale quipped, “Don’t you wish I was Jewish, too?” Koufax was the losing pitcher the next day, but Drysdale came back to win Game 4, and Koufax won Games 5 and 7 with a pair of shutouts, the latter on just two days’ rest.

Before Marvin Miller, the players union leader, and the advent of free agency, before sabermetrics, WAR, and WHIP, before five-man rotations, pitchers like Koufax and Drysdale — and such rivals as Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal and Warren Spahn — routinely made 40 starts a year and compiled 300 innings and 20-plus complete games.

(In 2023, Mets hurlers Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander earned more than a million dollars a start, and they each finished the year wearing a different team’s uniform. In 1966, a good major league pitcher might have averaged about a thousand dollars a start.)

In those days, baseball’s owners held the hammer. It was called the reserve clause. One-year contracts were the norm, and even the game’s biggest stars were vilified if they held out for better deals.

Legend has it that before the 1966 season began, Koufax and Drysdale met separately with the Dodgers’ general manager, Buzzie Bavasi, to negotiate their salaries. After Koufax’s meeting, he and Drysdale dined together. Koufax complained that Bavasi was using Drysdale against him in the negotiations, asking, “How come you want that much when Drysdale only wants this much?” Drysdale responded that Bavasi did the same thing when they met, pitting Koufax against him. Drysdale’s wife suggested that they bargain together. They demanded $1 million, divided equally over the next three years, or $167,000 each per season. At the time, Willie Mays was baseball’s highest paid player at $125,000 per year, and multiyear contracts were virtually nonexistent.

No matter how revered the star, holdouts were generally unpopular with fans. A pair of aces can be a losing hand against a full house of media, who tended to take their cues from the owners and their spokesmen. The public relations battle did not go well for the micro union. After four weeks, Koufax gave Drysdale the go-ahead to negotiate new deals for both of them. Koufax ended up getting $125,000; Drysdale, $110,000.

Koufax, though only 30 years old, was pitching on borrowed time. To get himself through his starts, Koufax resorted to Empirin with codeine for the pain, which he took every night and sometimes during the fifth inning. He also took Butazolidin for inflammation, applied capsaicin-based Capsolin ointment (called “atomic balm” by players) before each game, and soaked his arm in a tub of ice afterward. But he went out every fourth day to pitch. His 1966 stats — a 27-9 record, 1.73 ERA and 317 strikeouts in 323 innings — earned his third Triple Crown and third Cy Young Award in four years. Drysdale slumped that season to 13-16 and an ERA of 3.42, but the Dodgers again captured the National League pennant.

They didn’t repeat as World Series champions, getting swept by the Baltimore Orioles. Drysdale lost Games One and Four. The punchless Dodgers never led for even one inning. The only numbers they put up were goose eggs. They scored single runs in the second and third innings of Game 1 and were blanked for the next 33 innings, losing Games 3 and 4 by identical 1-0 scores. Game 2 was Koufax’s last career start. Due to his arm’s chronic arthritic condition, he announced his retirement on November 18, 1966, six weeks shy of his 31st birthday.

With just six seasons as an ace after six years as a raw, struggling bonus baby, his career stats were 165-87, a 2.76 ERA and more than one strikeout per inning, an extreme rarity in those days.

The Dodgers languished, but Drysdale soldiered on, his career peaking in 1968 when he broke Walter Johnson’s scoreless inning streak of 55 2/3 innings and set a new mark of 58 2/3 innings that lasted for 20 years before being eclipsed by another Dodger great, Orel Hershiser. Like Koufax, arm trouble brought Drysdale’s career to an abrupt halt in 1969 at the relatively youthful age of 33. His career stats: 209-166 and a 2.95 ERA.

Koufax and Drysdale’s effort at collective bargaining 60 years ago anticipated the players association, the overturning of the reserve clause, and the establishment of free agency in the mid-1970s, which led to the multimillion-dollar salaries of today — the extreme example being another Dodger pitcher (and slugger), Shohei Ohtani.

Dave Lieberfarb, who was born in Newark, is a lifelong Yankee fan who was devastated when Koufax’s Dodgers swept the Yankees in the 1963 World Series. He was a copy editor at The Star-Ledger in Newark from 1978 to 2008 and is now a proofreader for the Jewish Standard and New Jersey Jewish News.