Chapter 7

A LOVELY DAY AT DODGER STADIUM

Some of you were there the night Sandy was taken out in the
fifth inning of his seventh loss last year. It was August 17 against
the Reds, and 43,778 people gave him an ovation when the
announcement was made that Koufax had to leave the game
because of an injury. Sandy’s arthritic elbow had never been
known to flare up during a game as it did that night. You didn’t
need field glasses to see the face fire with pain when he tried
to throw curves. Dodger vice president Buzzie Bavasi and team
physician Dr. Robert Kerlan hurried to the clubhouse when San-
dy was taken out. . . . Dr. Robert Woods, another team physician,
loaded up the hypodermic with cortisone. Dr. Woods plunged it
into the inflamed elbow. Koufax groaned as Maury Wills and I,
who were watching, cringed.
 —November 19, 1966

I n the final days of the scalding 1965 National League pen-

nant race, Bud Furillo sat down in the Los Angeles Dodgers
dugout next to the greatest pitcher of the era.
It was the day of one of Sandy Koufax’s greatest achieve-
ments, before his arthritic elbow forced his premature retire-
ment the next year. Koufax had just fanned twelve batters on the
St. Louis Cardinals to break Bob Feller’s single-season strike-
out record, and the timing of the 2  – 0 shutout was pretty good.
It kept the Dodgers one game behind the league-leading San
Francisco Giants, with just eight games left on the schedule.
Inside the clubhouse, baseball writers from across the coun-
try waited to ambush Koufax. The Steamer, however, slipped
172 THE STEAMER

away from the pack. One of his favorite tricks was to sneak into
the dugout and listen in and take notes while the star of the
day did the exclusive post-game interview with Dodgers backup
play-by-play man Jerry Doggett.
When Koufax finished his interview with Doggett, the Steam-
er got up to head back into the clubhouse—and that’s when San-
dy called him back.
“Let’s sit here awhile,” Koufax said.
The Steamer settled back on the bench in the seat next to
Koufax. The two of them enjoyed the view from the dugout, look-
ing out over the field and the blue sky of a late-September Satur-
day in L.A., while the pitcher called a timeout for a brief moment
of reflection.
“It’s a pleasant afternoon at the ball game, huh?” Sandy in-
quired of the Steamer.
A month earlier, thirty-four people had been killed in the
Watts Riots. Five days after the riots ended, another one had
broken out in San Francisco when Giants pitcher Juan Marichal
smashed Dodger catcher Johnny Roseboro over the head with a
baseball bat.
Soon afterwards, the Giants got hotter than 103rd Street
the night they turned it into Charcoal Alley. They won four-
teen straight and seventeen of eighteen. By September 16, they
looked to be in control of the National League race, having
moved out to a four-and-a-half game lead.
Then the Dodgers took their turn. They won thirteen straight
over the last two weeks and fourteen of their final fifteen—eight
by shutout, three by Koufax, including this one on the Septem-
ber 25 day he broke Feller’s record of 348 strikeouts that had
lasted for nineteen years.
L.A. caught the Giants two days later and passed them the
day after that. On the second-to-last day of the season, the Dodg-
ers—behind Koufax—beat the Milwaukee Braves to clinch the
pennant.
In this pennant race marked by streaks, Furillo put together
one of his own. For nine straight days, he wrote columns on the
Dodgers that chronicled their run-up to running up the NL flag.
A LOVELY DAY AT DODGER STADIUM 173

The Steamer spotlighted the biggest hit of Rookie of the Year

Jim Lefebvre’s life, marveled at Al Ferrara’s timely dropping of a
foul pop, and paid tribute to career minor-leaguer Lou Johnson’s
clutch hitting and fielding. He showed how Willie Davis, the
self-described “man of a thousand stances,” finally settled on
one that worked and how Davis used it to pop two home runs to
win a game in the final week.
Furillo wondered about the sanity of fans driven so crazy by
the pennant race that they abandoned their cars in traffic so as
not to miss a single pitch by the brilliant Koufax. He implored
Dodgers management to pay more money to Koufax and his run-
ning mate in the Dodgers rotation, Don Drysdale—an issue of la-
bor relations that would grow more prominent the following year.
On Koufax’s record-breaking day, the Steamer was afford-
ed a few minutes of quiet time with the athlete who ranks as
perhaps the most cherished in the Los Angeles sports memory.
Only Magic Johnson compares.
Sixteen days earlier, Koufax had thrown a perfect game
against the Chicago Cubs, right after it seemed like the Giants
had put the Dodgers away in a two-game Chavez Ravine sweep,
the first meeting between the clubs since Marichal’s ADW on
Roseboro. With his smokestack-lightning fastball and a violent
curve that broke sharp as broken glass, Koufax struck out four-
teen Cubs, including the last six in a row, on his way to setting
them down twenty-seven straight.
Two starts later, Koufax shut out the Cardinals in St. Louis
on four hits. He shut them out again the next time out, when he
broke Feller’s record. Then he pitched his third straight shutout
against the Cincinnati Reds on September 29. It was his fourth
in five games going back to the perfect game, and he still had
enough to come back on two days rest to beat the Braves in the
clincher. He would finish the season with twenty-six wins, 382
strikeouts, and the second of his three Cy Young Awards.
About to turn thirty, the veteran of the broiling pennant races
in 1959, 1962, and 1963 knew to appreciate these precious mo-
ments. His arthritic elbow had already become a problem, and
his prime time in the finger-snap of history would soon give way
174 THE STEAMER

to the crush of the eons.

In one of the most hallowed moments of one of his most spec-
tacular years, during one of his team’s most intense competi-
tions, Koufax turned down the volume of his world and invited
Bud Furillo to share the calm, to enjoy a sense of timelessness as
they looked out at the purple majesty of the San Gabriel Moun-
tains beyond the pale-blue outfield walls.
Timelessness didn’t last very long for the Steamer. He was
on deadline.
In his piece for the next day’s paper, Furillo focused on Fell-
er’s mark and Sandy’s admission in the dugout that he “was deter-
mined to break the strikeout record in this game.” Furillo noted,
“All twelve of the Cardinals who went down Saturday struck out
swinging . . . refusing to give in to the world’s greatest pitcher.”
He followed Koufax as the pitcher made his entrance down
the ramp from the dugout into the clubhouse, and wrote about
how Sandy’s waiting teammates gave him a standing ovation.
He saw Sandy’s “warm-up jacket drenched in perspiration” and
how it was “crudely stitched in the back to hide a rip.” He wrote
about how the players, after cheering their star, quickly cracked
wise. With the Giants playing a tight one on TV up at Candle-
stick Park, John Kennedy, the late-inning defensive replacement
for Jim Gilliam at third base, suggested that Koufax fly to San
Francisco to close out the game for the Braves.
Cameras whirred and questions flew, and the writers took
notes as fast as they could to get it all down for the next day’s
paper, just a short while after Koufax and Furillo had sat alone
in the corner of the Dodger dugout.
What a pleasant afternoon at the ballpark it was.
• • • • •
As a rookie columnist, Bud Furillo lucked into an eight-year
unfolding of what is still the best baseball story in L.A. history.
From the spring of 1959, when the Steamer first began to clear
his throat in The Steam Room, until the fall of 1966, when he
became a seasoned voice in the local sports pages, the Los An-
geles Dodgers won four National League pennants and three
A LOVELY DAY AT DODGER STADIUM 175

World Series championships. In a fifth season, they tied for first

place but lost a three-game playoff for the NL flag. A half-centu-
ry later, it was still the best run they’ve ever had, in Los Angeles
or Brooklyn.
Vin Scully’s voice rang familiar and comfortable in back-
yards, at the beach, at the kitchen table, and mostly at the
ballpark, where transistor radios carried his disembodied de-
scription of the games in stereo, from foul pole to foul pole.
Farmer John, a butcher in Vernon, used the Dodger airwaves to
sell whole-fed, Eastern live pork that was brought out fresh and
“dressed” right there in the West.
Singer and comedian Danny Kaye recorded a hit with “The
D-O-D-G-E-R-S Song (Oh Really? No, O’Malley!),” an ode to a
mythical L.A. victory over the “Jints.” It continued to get airplay
decades later, in esteemed Southern California disc jockey Dr.
Demento’s popular radio broadcasts of musical novelties and
oddities.
During the Dodgers’ first years in the Coliseum, fans brought
trumpets and exhorted the team in a cavalry call to “charge.”
A few years later, when the team moved into the new stadium
built into the side of a low-rise hill overlooking downtown, there
was no need for the bugles. Whenever Maury Wills reached first
base, the fans clapped and screamed and shook the five decks
that soared skyward behind home plate. The scoreboard flashed
“Go! Go! Go!” and off Wills went against the nerve-damaged
opposing pitcher. Then Jim Gilliam got him over to third and
Ron Fairly or Wes Parker or Sweet Lou Johnson got him in, and
Koufax or Don Drysdale or Johnny Podres or Claude Osteen or
Don Sutton, with help from Larry Sherry or Stan Williams or Ron
Perranoski or Phil “The Vulture” Regan, would shut the other
guys down. Next thing you knew, you had to sweat out another
pennant race where only one team survived. Nobody had ever
heard of a “wild card.”
Furillo spent a couple nights a week, or more, at the Los An-
geles Memorial Coliseum in the team’s first Southern California
championship year of 1959. He was chained to the Angels beat
from 1961 to 1963, but even in those seasons, he broke free on
176 THE STEAMER

his off days to pour some stiff Steam Room takes on the Dodg-
ers, catching up with Koufax or Drysdale or general manager
Buzzie Bavasi to find his own angles on the team and its players
and executives. He played big roles in the Herald Examiner’s
post-season coverage of the Dodgers when they lost the playoff
to the Giants in ’62, and again when they swept the Yankees
in the 1963 World Series—maybe the greatest sports moment in
Los Angeles history. Then came his season-ending, nine-column
streak in 1965, followed by his reporting on Sandy Koufax’s

PENGUIN PERCHED ON THIRD FOR DODGERS

June 21, 1973

Forty-two persons were auditioned What about it Mr. Cey. Are

at third base by the Dodgers in Los
Angeles until the club gave the job
to The Penguin.
It appears at last that the team
has found the right bird for the
position.
Penguins are cool. You don’t
see penguins getting rattled like
the people who played third base
for the Dodgers. Penguins can play
any base.
For instance, Ron Jaworski,
of the Youngstown State Penguins,
played catcher until he left home
plate to sign with the Rams as a
pitcher.
The Penguin, who signs in as
Ron Cey, is unconcerned with the
problems that have beset Dodger
third basemen of the past. . . .
He doesn’t know that Jim Bax-
es, while playing third base for the
Dodgers, once threw a black cat out
of his path—and hurt his arm. . . .
you living dangerously out there?
“I don’t believe in jinxes,”
he said. “You make your own
jinxes.” . . .
. . . [Cey] is hitting over .300,
doubling to all fields when needed,
and doing it with a waddle that’s
exciting.
The Penguin’s waddle gives
me goose pimples. It’s like listen-
ing to “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine
In,” or Sinatra singing “Lady Is
a Tramp” to Hayworth. It’s the
Michigan marching band or Eddie
Jackson cakewalking in front of
Durante.
They say Dodger coach Tom
Lasorda named Cey The Penguin.
“He wasn’t the originator,
Chuck Brayton, my coach at Wash-
ington State, was,” said Cey. . . .
“Everybody runs differently. It
doesn’t matter of you run funny or
not so long as you get there.”
A LOVELY DAY AT DODGER STADIUM 177

final year in 1966. His dispatches from the trainer’s room, where
the pitcher spent hours after the game with his elbow in an ice
bucket or getting a cortisone shot plunged directly into the joint,
were as vivid as any in town.
Besides capturing the agony of Koufax enduring another
cortisone shot to help the Dodgers win the pennant, Furillo doc-
umented the growth of Drysdale from temperamental complain-
er into Hall of Famer. He wrote about the emergence of Wills
from loner to team leader. He brought out color and humor in
characters like Al Ferrara. He worked the bloodlines to tell the
story of a cousin, Carl Furillo, who won some big games for the
Dodgers in L.A. before angrily turning on the organization at
the end of his career. He gave field manager Walter Alston a fo-
rum to explain his decisions, and prodded president and owner
Walter O’Malley for inside information. He liked them all and
praised them for the team’s successes, and, when circumstances
demanded, held them accountable.
Bud Furillo wrote about the youthful coming together of
Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, Bill Russell, and Ron Cey, a group
that would constitute the longest-lasting infield in baseball his-
tory. They would grow together and win league championships
and eventually their own World Series under the Steamer’s pal,
Tommy Lasorda.
• • • • •
Assigned to Vero Beach to help cover Dodgers spring training
in 1959, Bud Furillo got an early feeling that the club was in for
something big.
The year before, in their first season in Los Angeles, the
Dodgers fell flat, with mostly an old team left over from the East
Coast. They had some prospects, but the kids needed season-
ing, and maybe a few more teaspoons of ability. The ’58 Dodg-
ers broke last and finished seventh. Baseball pundits predicted
more floundering in ’59 for a club that just wasn’t on the same
talent plane as Milwaukee or San Francisco.
True, nobody like Aaron or Mathews or Mays or Cepeda peo-
pled the Dodgers roster. But in his first dispatch from Florida,
178 THE STEAMER

Furillo picked up on intangibles such as energy and a sense of

urgency. Players came to camp in shape. Manager Walter Alston
played no favorites. He made it clear that incumbency wouldn’t
buy advantage anywhere on the field.
“Competition breeds greatness,” the Steamer wrote, “and
never have I seen more in evidence than here in this teeming
baseball factory known as Dodgertown.”
Furillo told Dodger fans to keep an eye on three players.
In an off-season deal with the Cardinals, the Dodgers acquired
Wally Moon, a twenty-nine-year-old former Rookie of the Year
who had four solid seasons in St. Louis before an elbow injury in
1958 hurt his numbers.
“We’re going on the hunch that last year was a fluke,” Dodg-
er general manager Buzzie Bavasi told the Steamer.
Furillo bought in on Moon, saying his acquisition, in ex-
change for Gino Cimoli, “may be the best move the Dodgers
have made since they traded in Brooklyn for Los Angeles.”
Nobody figured Wally would win games with his brain as
well as his bat. A left-handed hitter, Moon, who had earned a
master’s degree in administrative education from Texas A&M,
taught himself an inside-out swing to take advantage of the short
left field situation in the Coliseum, where the Dodgers played
for four years before they moved into their new stadium. If you
could get the ball into the air in left, you had a good chance for
extra bases, in a field where it was only 251 feet down the line.
To compensate for the short dimension, the designers who drew
a ballpark into the football stadium added in a forty-two-foot-
high screen. The analytical Moon then learned to lift the ball
into and over the netting. He finished the 1959 season with nine-
teen home runs, eleven triples, twenty-six doubles, and seven-
ty-four runs batted in. Moon hit .302, started in the All-Star game
alongside Willie Mays and Henry Aaron, and ranked fourth in
the year’s Most Valuable Player voting.
Back from his fact-finding trip to Florida, the Steamer also
predicted success for one of the organization’s most valued as-
sets. Don Drysdale was a six-foot-five kid from the San Fernan-
do Valley who looked great in 1957, the Dodgers’ last year in
A LOVELY DAY AT DODGER STADIUM 179

DRYSDALE TABBED AS DODGER TO WATCH IN ’59

March 27, 1959

Steam Room clients are here-
by informed that [Don] Drysdale
is likely to be the most valuable
player owned by the Los Angeles
Dodgers.
It’s like this. The tall bat-tamer
from Van Nuys has conquered the
problem of growing up.
Passing into adulthood as a
twenty-one-year-old last season,
Drysdale encountered every ob-
stacle but the finance company.
His handsome salary blocked that
possibility. . . .
Let’s examine the misery
which confronted Don.
(A) Army duty interrupted his
spring training.
(B) He worried about the left-
field screen at the Coliseum, which
used to scrape his knuckles when
he reared back to fire.
(C) Pitching instructions given
him to combat the screen didn’t suit
his delivery.
(D) His temper ran wild, with-
out Roy Campanella around to har-
ness it.
(E) He fell in love.
Well sir, before anybody could
figure out what was bothering the
kid, he was 1–7 instead of 7–1.
Things looked so bad that many felt
a brilliant career had been ruined.
Something Drysdale wouldn’t
do, however, was give up on
himself.
One by one, he conquered his
problems.
Once again his sidewinding
stuff became poisonous to National
League batters. . . .
The steadied Drysdale won
eight of his last eleven games, six
of them in a row. Overall, it was a
12–13 season.
This was far from the twenty
wins expected of him at season’s
outset, but extremely encouraging
after that brutal beginning. . . .
The six-foot-six-inch Drysdale
practically opened the Dodger
camp at Vero Beach, Florida, being
one of the first arrivals. Nobody
worked any harder. . . .
Everything points to a big year
for Don Drysdale, perhaps even
bigger than his 17–8 season in
1957.

Brooklyn. His first season in L.A., he started out 1 –7. Don’s prob-
lem was, he’d been psyched out by the same thing that made
Wally Moon a star: that short left-field screen in the Coliseum.
In his travels to Vero Beach in the spring of ’59, Furillo picked
up on some changes in Drysdale’s mental approach—not just to
180 THE STEAMER

the screen, but to life in general. During the off-season, Drysdale

married a Rose Parade princess, and the Steamer predicted that
marriage would settle Don down and make him grow up.
“Everything points to a big year for Don Drysdale,” Furillo
wrote.
The pitcher delivered on The Steam Room’s prediction,
leading the league with 242 strikeouts, winning seventeen, and
throwing four shutouts. One of the best-hitting pitchers of all
time, he also slugged four home runs. He started in one of the
All-Star games and pitched three hitless innings, striking out
four.
Furillo identified catcher Johnny Roseboro as the third play-
er on the verge of a breakthrough. The year before, Roseboro
was hurried into the catcher’s position left vacant by the car
crash that paralyzed the Hall of Famer from the Brooklyn days,
Roy Campanella. Roseboro hit well enough, but the Dodgers
were forced to play his bat in the outfield much of the time be-
cause he wasn’t getting the hang of the game behind the plate.
From the squat, Roseboro “reached for a low pitch like a
lady warding off a mouse,” Furillo observed in 1958. To help the
new guy out, the Dodgers brought Campanella, in his wheel-
chair, to Florida in the spring of ‘59 to give Roseboro a few tips.
Inspired by Campy, “Johnny is now scrambling in the manner of
a dog, burying a bone,” Furillo wrote. In 1959, Roseboro threw
out sixty percent of all the runners who tried to steal on him—the
best in the National League.
With those three leading the way, the Dodgers started fast
and stayed near the top of the tightly packed National League
standings through the first half of the season. On July 4, only five
and a half games separated the top five teams.
A few other pieces fell into place in the second half, when
the Dodgers reached into the minors to bring up pitcher Roger
Craig, who won eleven games in three months, and shortstop
Maury Wills, a twenty-six-year-old rookie who overcame a shaky
start to raise his batting average 117 points from July 3 to Sep-
tember 29.
On the Sandy Koufax front, flashes of brilliance began
A LOVELY DAY AT DODGER STADIUM 181

to show. The night of August 31, with 82,000 in the Coliseum

(60,194 paid) and the second-place Dodgers trailing San Fran-
cisco by two games, Koufax struck out eighteen Giants in a 5–2
win. He got Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, and Orlando Cepeda
twice each. He struck out seven in a row in the middle innings,
and he struck out the side in the ninth on ten pitches.
Even though he had thrown 147 pitches, Walter Alston sent
Koufax up to the plate to lead off the bottom of the ninth in a 2–2
game. Damn if Koufax didn’t get a hit. Jim Gilliam followed with
another, and up came Wally Moon.
“[Wally] strides to the plate with the confidence of a marshal
pacing his way toward a gunslinger at sundown,” Furillo wrote.
Before he took his purposeful walk, Wally, according to the
Steamer, turned around and told on-deck hitter Norm Larker,
“You can take a seat, man. I’m going to hit one out of here.”
Moon then stepped into the box, eyed San Francisco right-
hander Jack Sanford, took a peek at the screen 251 feet away in
left—and then lifted one over it.
Puffing on a cigarette after the homer, Wally told the Steam-
er, “You know, I’m going to miss this park when we move.”
An appreciative Sandy Koufax rewarded Moon with a kiss.
• • • • •
Duke Snider, a Hall of Famer, hit .308, with twenty-three home
runs and eighty-eight runs batted in. Gil Hodges went .276 on
the season with twenty-five and eighty. It was their last produc-
tive year for the Dodgers.
Jackie Robinson had been retired for a couple years. Campy
was in a wheelchair, Don Newcombe was in Cincinnati, and
the shortstop, Pee Wee Reese, was coaching third base. Carl
Erskine pitched ten innings and retired. Besides reliever Clem
Labine, that left only one other holdover still on the L.A. roster
who had contributed to the glory of Ebbets Field.
Carl Furillo, the Steamer’s first cousin once removed, was a
charter member of the Boys of Summer, his story immortalized
along with Robinson and Reese and the rest in Roger Kahn’s
great book. Nicknamed “The Reading Rifle” after his hometown