Koufax et al. v. Mantle et al.

Once de rigueur, there hasn't been a Dodger-Yankee World Series in 43 years

It really hurts to do it this way

If you’re 40, there have been no Dodgers-Yankees World Series in your lifetime.

If you’re 50, there have been three.

If you’re 60, there have been four.

If you’re 70, there have been six.

If you’re 80, there have been . . . ten. Of the twelve all time.

For me there have been four, and some of my memories of them came at an early enough age that they soon inspired me to read more about Major League Baseball. A book I nabbed early on was Sandy Koufax’s autobiography (as told to Ed Linn). Here’s an excerpt from Sandy Koufax’s autobio on Game One of the 1963 Series. (I’ve had this book since it came out in 1966, and Koufax signed it for me when it was released, at the old May Co. at 7th and Grand.)

Boy did the wheel turn. This was to become a fabled day, as Koufax set a record for most strikeouts in a World Series – a record surpassed by Bob Gibson five years later. But Gibson struck out Tigers, not Yankees, in the most notoriously bad-hitter year of all time: 1968. To take nothing away from Gibson: yet Mantle and Maris and Tresh and Elston Howard and Bobby Richardson and Kubek and even Joe Pepitone were all there in 1963, the Yankee mystique was still intact; a year later CBS would buy the team, and, as Roger Angell said in one of his rare footnootes, “the Bronxian Dark Ages had begun.”

Speaking of Angell, his coverage of the 1963 Series was a rare clink – perhaps he hadn’t been comped tickets, or declared a dedicated enough sports writer – and the four game sweep found him wandering Manhattan for bars to crawl. Still, there are high moments. Here he is on the same game:

I suppose the idea of the sports bar just sat there, waiting to be invented after color tv’s antediluvian epoch had had its run.

Koufax struck out the first five Yankees he faced;

In our other three Game One of more recent vintage, the Dodgers lost a tense extra inning game in 1977. In the sixth innning, to-day’s California Senate candidate, Steve Garvey, tried to score from first on a hit-and-run single by Glenn Burke; he was called out, even though replays indicated he had indeed scored safely. The Dodgers won a laugher in the opening game in 1978; and the Bronx Bombers prevailed again in the first frame in 1981.

Settle in at 5:08 Pacific; we’re just getting started.