@EasyAce My family moved to Orange County, California, in 1962. I was 12 years old. My memories are incorrect, obviously! I should have looked done more research than what I remembeed. Totally my fault.
But tell me something if you are able, why did Sandy stay with the Dodgers if they were so hard on their pitchers.? I do know he retired at the top of his game by looking at his stats.
@Slip18 Koufax's job in the 1980s was as a roving pitching instructor in the Dodger organisation;
indeed, he eventually gave that up later in the decade when he and Lasorda disagreed
over an expense report. Koufax wasn't on Lasorda's major league coaching staff and
probably had no input into how Lasorda managed his bullpens. For a long enough time
after that, Koufax worked as a kind of free-lance coach, available if asked, by several
organisations including the Dodgers.
Koufax retiring at the top of his game? He was somewhere beyond the sixth dimension
when he retired. And to this day he's the youngest man ever elected to the Hall of
Fame as a player.
Lasorda wasn't the only manager Herzog skewered for mis-handling his bullpens. Pete
Rose made the same mistake with his Cincinnati bullpens before you-know-what put
him out of that managing job: warming a pitcher up several times and not using him
one day, warming the same guy up the next and not using him, warming the same
guy up on day three, bringing him in, wondering why he'd get killed on the mound,
then harrumphing, "Whatsamatta with him, he ain't pitched in three days?" It
nevercrossed their minds---and they weren't the only culprits, either (hello, Billy Martin,
master destroyer of pitching staffs)---that when you have a guy warming up in the
pen
he's throwing pitches, maybe even the equivalent of a five-inning quality
start, before you bring him in if
you bring him in.Herzog had a rule: if he warmed you up and didn't bring you in in the same inning
or the next inning, you had the rest of the day off. He got some excellent miles out
of a lot of relief pitchers by being smart with them.
I last wrote about that issue and those men in February:
Shorten games? Eliminate the eight relief warmups. (No, I’m not as crazy as you think . . . )
