“This is it,” Koufax said to Ferrara, who was troubled by his words. Ferrara told no one, wondering if he had heard right. A few weeks later, with the team in another country, Koufax took his leave of it.

There’s another milestone running parallel to Koufax’s, and to which it is directly related: On October 2 earlier this month, Vin Scully called his final regular-season game after 67 years as the Dodger broadcaster, a record perhaps as untouchable as any of Koufax’s, if not more so. It’s no surprise then that when the old elephants of the Dodgers gathered in Los Angeles this spring on Opening Day and in the fall, the one person Scully walked up to and embraced fully was Koufax. The caller and the doer. The one with the words and the one with the ball, both left speechless in the embrace.

Each has been curious about the other a long time. In 2013, Scully asked his unlikely double in an interview: “How do you define the art of pitching?” Koufax answered succinctly, “Control.” For all his blinding speed, Koufax took as much pleasure in pinpointing what Vin often called “his twelve-to-six curveball,” meaning it started at 12 o’clock and the bottom fell out to 6 o’clock. As the great power-hitting Chicago Cubs shortstop Ernie Banks once described it, “Sandy’s curve had a lot more spin than anyone else’s. It spun like a fastball coming out of his hand. It jumped at the end.” But over time the blood began draining from his left index finger—the critical one for curve direction—leaving it numb. His left palm, pinched at the heel of the bat when he swung in 1962 for a rare hit, didn’t help, nor a badly ruptured elbow when he dove back to second base in a Tony Cloninger pick-off attempt in 1964, after which he had “to drag my arm out of bed like a log.” His career ended at 30, with his already arthritic arm so wrecked he could not lift it. He found himself actually listening to his swollen arm, “the sound of liquid squishing around, as if I had a wet sponge in there.”

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The truth is that Sandy Koufax for the first half of his career was only a marginal player and by today’s standards would have been dropped. Three years into his move to Los Angeles, and six years after Brooklyn signed him for a measly $6,000 per annum, he was preparing to leave the game, considering himself a failure, and ready to work in an electronics warehouse.

Koufax only briefly played high-school baseball—he was a basketball player for four years—and wasn’t much interested in the sport. With his outsized hands and arms and back he seemed a better fit for basketball, and at 6’2”, he was a decent size for a guard in those days. In his senior year at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, he averaged 16.5 points per game. The first time Koufax was ever highlighted in a newspaper article was for dunking during a basketball exhibition game when the New York Knicks took on local youth players. In fact, he showed up his own hero, the brawny center Harry Gallatin, who’d failed to dunk before him, to the dismay of the crowd. On February 10, 1953, The New York Post noted “the spring and coordination of a rangy youngster,” testimony Koufax would later wave at those who spread rumors that he was “uncoordinated” on a baseball field.