I absolutely agree about Koufax. In fact, when Alston and Dark met after the game, Dark reputedly said to Alston, "I'm sorry about Koufax. That was the difference."
There was a secondary factor, and its name was Don Drysdale.
In 1962, on 10 August, when the stretch drive really cranks over, Drysdale was 21-4 with a 2.82 ERA.
The rest of the way he was 4-5, though his ERA held and he finished with a 2.83. Note the kicker: He
lost more down the stretch than he won over the first hundred games of the season, and he also
surrendered a basketful of unearned runs. In fact, if the unearned runs he surrendered were charged
to his record his ERA would have gone over 4.00.
Here's how Drysdale fared against the Giants---the team the Dodgers needed most to beat in 1962---
down the stretch:
11 August---He faced Billy Pierce in Candlestick Park, surrendered five runs in six innings, three of
which came by way of Willie McCovey pinch hitting and hitting a three-run homer. The Dodgers
lost the game.
6 September---He faced Billy O'Dell. He gave up five runs in seven and a third and came out of
the game with a one-run deficit. The Dodgers tied it up to get Drysdale off the hook but they
ended up losing.
The second playoff game---Drysdale against Jack Sanford. He got hit for five runs
againand came out in the sixth. They rallied to win the game to force a third game. But think that
if Drysdale had won the prior two starts against the Giants there may not have been a playoff
in the first place. That might not have augered any better for the World Series, since Koufax
still wouldn't be 100 percent, but the Dodgers might have banked a pennant anyway.
As a matter of fact, Don Drysdale had twelve chances in his career to beat the one team the
Dodgers most needed to beat to stay in the race or nail the pennant and he
neverbeat them. He was 0-6 with six no-decisions and a 5.33 ERA in those games, and he almost
never pitched well enough to win the games he lost or came away with no-decision.
Against
all contenders in seven key pennant races between 1959 and 1966, Drysdale's
record is 6-13 with a 4.17 ERA.
In 1962, Drysdale won the Cy Young Award. Arguably, the award should have gone to
Cincinnati's Bob Purkey, but a) in the years when the award went to one pitcher across the
board (and for a long time after), a pitcher in a pennant race was more likely to win the
award unless someone else did something completely earthshattering (like Steve Carlton
winning 27 games for a dead last team on which he accounted for a full third of their wins);
and, b) Purkey's repertoire included a knuckleball, and in those years there was still a
kind of bias against knuckleballs whether it was the pitcher's number one pitch or part
of his repertoire. With Koufax's injury erasing him from the picture after he was almost
clearly running away with the possible award, Purkey was the best pitcher in baseball in
1962 (he edged out Jack Sanford and Whitey Ford that season overall), but the Reds being
out of the race and Purkey's butterfly pitch worked against him.
