Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, Jane Kamensky wrote about Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Father who cautioned future generations against venerating the Founding Fathers. Today, Joseph Epstein pays tribute to Sandy Koufax, the star pitcher whose athletic prowess was as rare as his modesty. —The Editors
In 1958, the journalist Harry Golden published a book of essays under the title Only in America. The essays are no longer of interest, but the title lives on. Only in America, I believe, could an athlete like the baseball player Sandy Koufax emerge. After pitching for the Brooklyn and (when the team moved west) Los Angeles Dodgers between 1955 and 1966, Koufax’s career was cut short at the age of 30 by pain in his left, or pitching, elbow. Before that he had won all the awards and prizes offered by the game of baseball, including being named Most Valuable Player in 1963.
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Baseball is a game dominated by statistics, and in his last six seasons, Koufax established himself statistically as among the greatest pitchers, if not the greatest, in the long history of the game. He threw 40 shutouts and averaged more than nine strikeouts a game. He led the National League in earned-run average in each of his last five seasons. Three times he won the pitchers’ Triple Crown—for the most wins, lowest earned-run average, and most strikeouts in a season—and three times the Cy Young Award. (An old joke asks who is the only great pitcher never to win the Cy Young Award? The answer: Cy Young.) Koufax threw four no-hitters in four seasons, and on September 9, 1965, he pitched a perfect game, facing only 27 opposing hitters.
