Don Drysdale

Donald Scott Drysdale stood six feet five, threw sidearm, and believed that any pitcher who let a hitter dig in at the plate was committing professional malpractice. "My own little rule was two for one," Drysdale said. "If one of my teammates got knocked down, then I knocked down two on the other team." Drysdale won 209 games for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers, struck out 2,486 batters, completed 167 of his 465 starts, and hit 154 batters, a modern National League record. He won the 1962 Cy Young Award, pitched 58 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings in 1968 to break Walter Johnson's record, hit 29 home runs as a pitcher (sixth most in the history of the game), and formed one half of the most feared pitching partnership of the 1960s with Sandy Koufax. Dick Groat of the Pirates summarized what it meant to face him. "Batting against Drysdale is the same as making a date with the dentist." The BBWAA elected Drysdale to the Hall of Fame in 1984 on 78.4 percent of the ballot, and nine years later he died of a heart attack in a Montreal hotel room at 56, with a cassette tape of Robert Kennedy's last speech among his belongings.

Van Nuys

Drysdale was born on July 23, 1936, in Van Nuys, California. His father Scott, a former minor league pitcher, worked as a repair supervisor for Pacific Telephone and Telegraph and taught his son to throw by playing catch in the yard. Drysdale attended Van Nuys High School (where Robert Redford was a classmate), signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1954 for a $4,000 bonus, and spent a year at Bakersfield and a year at Montreal before debuting on April 17, 1956, at 19. He threw a scoreless ninth inning in his first appearance, then won his first start six days later with a complete game against the Phillies, striking out nine.

Drysdale learned the art of pitching inside from Sal Maglie, the former Giants pitcher who joined the Dodgers in the late 1950s and whose nickname, "The Barber," came from the closeness of his shaves. Drysdale absorbed the lesson and took it further. His sidearm delivery made his fastball run in on right-handed hitters with a violence that was part physics and part intention. When Cardinals catcher Gene Oliver hit a home run and admired it, Drysdale drilled him with a fastball the next time up and called to the dugout, "Hey, batboy, come get Oliver." Mickey Mantle said, "I hated to bat against Drysdale. After he hit you he'd come around, look at the bruise on your arm and say, 'Do you want me to sign it?'" Drysdale led the National League in hit batsmen five times, four of them consecutive.

Big D

Drysdale won the Cy Young Award in 1962 with a 25-9 record, 232 strikeouts, and a 2.83 ERA across 314 1/3 innings and 41 starts, the most by a Dodger since 1904. In 1965 he won 23 games while Koufax won 26, and together they accounted for 49 of the team's 97 victories. When Koufax sat out Game 1 of the 1965 World Series to observe Yom Kippur and Walter Alston gave the start to Drysdale instead, Drysdale lost. He told Alston afterward, "Hey, skip, bet you wish I was Jewish today too." Drysdale came back to win Game 4 with 11 strikeouts.

Before the 1966 season, Drysdale and Koufax hired entertainment lawyer J. William Hayes and held out together for 32 days, demanding a million dollars split equally over three years. The Dodgers settled for one-year deals worth $110,000 for Drysdale and $125,000 for Koufax, making them the first pitchers to earn six figures. During the holdout both signed up for a movie called "Warning Shot." Marvin Miller, who would transform baseball's labor landscape over the next decade, later called the holdout "the first key event" that led to free agency.

58 2/3

From May 14 through June 8, 1968, Drysdale pitched six consecutive shutouts and 58 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings, breaking Walter Johnson's record of 55 2/3 innings set in 1913. Three of his wins during the streak came by 1-0 scores. On the night of June 4, with his streak at 54 innings, Drysdale shut out Pittsburgh 5-0, and at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Robert Kennedy paused during his California primary victory speech to say, "I like to express my high regard to Don Drysdale, who pitched his sixth straight shutout tonight. And I hope we can have as good fortune in our campaign." Kennedy was assassinated moments later. Drysdale carried a cassette recording of that speech with him for the rest of his life.

The scoreless streak ended in the fifth inning of his next start against Philadelphia, and the record stood for 20 years until Orel Hershiser pitched 59 consecutive scoreless innings in September 1988. When Hershiser initially hesitated to pursue the record out of respect, Drysdale told him, "I would have gone out there and kicked him in the rear." When Hershiser broke it, Drysdale congratulated him on the broadcast and said, "At least you kept it in the family."

Montreal

A torn rotator cuff ended Drysdale's career midway through the 1969 season after only 12 starts. He was the last active player from the Brooklyn Dodgers era. Drysdale moved into broadcasting and spent 23 years behind the microphone, working for the Expos, Rangers, Angels, White Sox, ABC, NBC, and the Dodgers. He called Kirk Gibson's famous World Series walkoff home run in 1988 for the Dodgers Radio Network, and he was on the air when Hershiser broke his record. He married Ann Meyers, the UCLA basketball All-American who was the first woman signed by an NBA team, in 1986, and when she was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1993, they became the first married couple inducted into their respective sports' halls of fame.

On July 2, 1993, Drysdale worked the television broadcast of a Dodgers game in Montreal. The following morning, hotel staff found him on the floor of his room at Le Centre Sheraton. The coroner determined he had died of a heart attack. He was 56. Vin Scully announced the death on the air that afternoon. "Never have I been asked to make an announcement that hurts me as much as this one," Scully said. "And I say it to you as best I can with a broken heart." Koufax said, "Don is one of those people you didn't think anything could ever happen to."