Clemente or Koufax?

[Mark17]

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

So much rancor and misinformation too.

Would Koufax be revered as much for not pitching game 7 rather than game 1? The question misses the point. Koufax's stance on pitching wasn't situational, it was ethical. Which game he had to sit wouldn't have mattered once the ethical commitment to honor the holiday was made. Hank Greenberg dealt with the same thing a generation earlier.

The question does not miss the point. Ordinarily, Koufax would have pitched Game 1, 4, and 7 in the 1965 Series. He gets credit for making this tremendous sacrifice because of his religion, but all it really meant was that, instead, he pitched Game 2, 5, and 7.

Again my question is, with the season riding on Game 7, would Koufax have sat, if that day been Yom Kippur, and if he did, and the Dodgers had lost, what would have been the reaction of his teammates and fans?

Look, I'm a Koufax fan. He was great, virtually unhittable. Just saying, that whole refusal to pitch Game 1 because of Yom Kippur has been vastly overrated. I wonder what the reaction had been, if it would have actually involved making a major sacrifice, like the losing of a World Series.

Originally Posted by Exhibitman

Now, back to Koufax. The Dodgers had a better line-up on paper than the Yankees, except for one thing: pitching. It was pitching that had beaten the Dodgers every Series. The Yankees had the arms. Koufax had a left arm touched by God; that was apparent from the outset. Hell, he struck out 14 Reds in a game as a 19 year old in 1955. The Dodgers were 'arming' for the Yankees. Outfield was not the same level of urgency.

Agree completely. And if you look at the Dodgers' history in the World Series, they lost a bunch of them before they bolstered their pitching staff and landed Koufax and after that, they won a bunch with him as the star (especially in 1963 and 1965.)