There Is Joy In Mudville

It's warm today here in southern California, even though the calendar says it's still winter.

That's what everybody likes about southern California.

Along with the warm weather of early March comes a piece of very good news for Los Angeles Dodgers fans.

Sandy Koufax is back in Dodger blue. Yes!

Sandy Koufax imparts wisdom to youth.

Koufax was signed by the old Brooklyn Dodgers for $10,000 as a "bonus baby" in 1955, (the year I was born), retired from pitching for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1966 after a string of amazing seasons, and is (deservedly) a legend. He is the greatest lefty who ever pitched for the Dodgers, and maybe the greatest lefty, period. (I would answer "yes" to the latter, because Koufax has been one of my gods since I was a  child.) But I don't want to spark any baseball debates, and by the way, my friends who are San Francisco Giants fans are hereby excused.

I'm usually the last one to hear news. I don't read newspapers, I don't watch TV news, and I avoid Internet news websites. But I do watch baseball, and when it's not available on TV, I listen to it on the radio. Yesterday I was listening to the Dodgers play the Angels in a spring training game on KLAC AM 570 out of Los Angeles, and KLAC laid some joy on me.

Sandy is coaching Dodger pitchers in spring training again. This is good news for the Dodgers.

And for me.

Koufax and the Dodger organization have had their estrangements over the years. The reclusive Koufax has distanced himself from the Dodgers more than once, although for many years after his retirement he showed up at spring training camp every winter to observe, advise and, well yes, be gawked at. (I'm sure this last caused Koufax some discomfort. He shuns the spotlight and doesn't like to talk about himself.)

But listening to yesterday's game on the radio, I learned that Koufax had been talked into coming back. Former Dodger owner Rupert Murdoch is long gone, and with him his media empire, which includes the New York Post. The Post published a piece in 2003 that so angered Koufax he disappeared again, and was gone for years.

But now he's back. The Dodgers and their fans may rejoice.

To commemorate this great occasion, I will now reproduce a poem  wrote a couple of years ago about my childhood experience of watching Koufax pitch, once and once only, on television:



Sandy Koufax posted an unbelieveable
.038 ERA in three games of the 1965 World Series
against the Minnesota Twins. I was ten, and
will never see the like again.
 

Seeing Sandy Koufax

 

I ran home from school one afternoon -- ran, got it?

Because baseball was still an afternoon game then,

and I wanted to get in front of the Sears

black-and-white portable as quickly as I could.

 

I couldn't have known it, but I was racing the clock

for keeps: at the end of that very season he retired.

The elbow caught up with the arm from hell.

 

But I got there. KTLA, Channel 5: I saw it,

him, the clockwork nightmare. (Willie Mays

Himself said the ball looked like an aspirin --

you barely sensed it whooshing past,

a dancing bullet in the afternoon light.)

 

Baffled hitters had two-tenths of a second

to watch it drop like Tennyson's eagle. Dancing.

 

Children, there was nothing like it. I pity you,

not having been there, never having seen.

His body became a slingshot like David's,

or like the spaceship in that dumb sequel to 2001,

 

where it sweeps around Jupiter, and using

the giant planet's gravity, slingshots itself violently

toward home. (This was about pitching, and going home.)

 

I got to see it in glorious black-and-white.

I was ten, and would never see its like again.

 

KD

 

A few years ago someone published a book entitled 101 Reasons To Love The Dodgers.

 

This is Reason #102.

 

Play ball!