Word: koufax
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...resetting the club right now, with the idea that Sandy won't be with us." So spoke disconsolate Buzzie Bavasi, the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, after doctors last April diagnosed the pain and swelling in Sandy Koufax' pitching elbow as a "traumatic arthritic condition" that flares up "under repeated stress...
...what have the Dodgers got? For one thing they have, as New York Mets Pitcher Warren Spahn says, "the best pitching staff in baseball." Lefthander Sandy Koufax has painful arthritis in his throwing elbow, still leads the league with twelve wins (v. three losses) and 159 strikeouts. Righthander Drysdale, when he isn't thinking about base hits, pitches well enough to post another eleven victories. Lefthander Claude Osteen, picked up over the winter from the American League's Washington Senators, has accounted for six, and "should have won three more victories than he shows," according to Manager Alston...
What makes the Dodgers, of course, is the pitching staff, and, yes, I'm quite aware of Sandy Koufax's latest medical bulletins. If Koufax can't pitch at all. I agree, the Dodgers are dead. But if he can go once a week, which the doctors say he probably can do, the Dodgers look golden. No other team can bring a topflight starter to the mound as consistently as Los Angeles, with Koufax, Don Drysdale, and the rejuvenated Johnny Podres now backed up by Claude Osteen, who some won 15 games for the lowly Washington Senators last year...
They should have known better. Most people who play Russian roulette have better luck than Koufax. In 1962 he was laid up with a circulatory ailment called Raynaud's Phenomenon. It might have affected any of ten fingers, but it settled in the left index finger, the one that controls the curve. So much for that season. Sandy won 25 games in 1963, figured to do even better last year, when he picked up his 19th in August. If only he hadn't jammed his left elbow sliding into base...
...Florida last week, Koufax got up one morning to find that his left arm was stiff and swollen. General Manager Buzzie Bavasi packed him off to Los Angeles for X rays. The verdict: at 29 he has a "traumatic arthritic condition" in his pitching elbow that flares up under "repeated stress"-throwing a baseball, for instance. Koufax cannot pitch the Dodgers' season opener, and there is no telling when he will be back in action-if at all. There is, of course, no cure for arthritis. Said Bavasi: "I am resetting the club right now, with the idea that...