Ed Roebuck, pitcher on the Brooklyn Dodgers 1955 championship team, dies at 86
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@Machiavelli Ed Roebuck was also a member of the ill-fated 1964 Phillies; he had his last truly good season on that team, with 12 saves and a 2.30 earned run average. His best gig that year was probably the five-inning stint he pitched out of the pen in a sixteen-inning game the Phillies went on to lose to the Dodgers, 4-3, when Jack Baldschun, the Phillies' other top reliever that year, pitched two and two thirds shutout innings afterward until he loaded the bases on a wild pitch, came out for Morrie Steevens, and Ron Fairly stole home to win it and charge Baldschun with the hard-luck loss. (It was another steal of home, of course---Cincinnati rookie Chico Ruiz, catching Philadelphia pitcher Art Mahaffey, who had the best pickoff move in the league at the time, completely by surprise when he broke for home with Frank Robinson at the plate. The startled Mahaffey threw home high and Ruiz made it safe. It started the infamous losing streak, abetted when a furious Gene Mauch apparently blamed Mahaffey's "cracking under pressure" for the theft---an accusation Mahaffey's teammates reject to this day---and refused to let Mahaffey make his next start.)
Roebuck roomed with Sandy Koufax on the Dodgers, at a time when Koufax wasn't yet Koufax, and when Koufax one day in 1960 thought aloud about leaving baseball, Roebuck replied, "Sandy, if you do, would you leave me your left arm?" Roebuck himself was coming back from arm trouble (it cost him a spot on the Dodgers' 1959 World Series winner) when he was put in the charge of a scout named Ken Meyers, who showed him how to work around his shoulder issues without damaging the shoulder any further. It was Meyers---with Roebuck, catcher Norm Sherry, and outfielder Wally Moon along for the ride---who prompted Koufax in a pizza bar to wind up, throw to a spot Meyers burned in the wall with a cigar, and there was where Meyers spotted the flaw that kept Koufax back: Koufax pulled so far back winding up and kicking to throw that he obstructed half his vision to the plate. Meyers got Koufax to straighten up more in his windup and Sherry translated it as "Sandy, you don't have to throw so hard." The next day, pitching in a B-game in spring training, Koufax wiggled out of a first-inning jam, kept throwing with the straighter windup and easier delivery (Sherry at the mound: "Sandy, I don't know if you realise it, but your ball got to the plate faster when you weren't trying to throw it that hard"), threw a seven-inning no-hitter, and began to become Koufax.
"Goes to show you how hard baseball is," Roebuck said. "Casey Stengel once said, 'Forget that other fella. [Walter Johnson.] Forget Waddell. The Jewish kid is the best of any of them."
