Baseball: The Best

Sandy Koufax had not won a game since Aug. 14, and for a while, as he labored against the Chicago Cubs last week, the 29,139 fans in Los Angeles' Dodger Stadium wondered whether baseball's top pitcher (record: 21-7) still had his stuff. His first pitch hit the dirt three feet in front of home plate, and for two full innings he threw nothing but curve balls—struggling to loosen the cramped muscles of his arthritic pitching arm. Finally, he tried a tentative fast ball, then a second and a third—and the crowd began to buzz as one after another the...