Maybe I’m stuck in the 1960s like my brother says, but sometimes even stuff I’ve thought about so repetitively I feel like an idiot savant, minus most of the savant part, can feel new to me. We all have this idea about Koufax that he "won all the close games" (that’s a quote from the first Historical Abstract, p.  413) and our idea about Drysdale is that somehow his W-L record always mysteriously lagged behind his strong ERA performances, but then it occurred to me that it didn’t HAVE to be that way. Further, their own performances could have been exactly what they were, only with different run support that worked out, collectively, to be identical to the Dodgers’ team performance in each season.

Let me illustrate: Koufax’s first Cy Young Award came in 1963, when he went 25-5 with a 1.88 ERA and 11 shutouts.  That means he went 14-5 in the games he didn’t pitch a shutout, right? That’s pretty good—in the non-shutout games, he went 14-5 with a 2.65 ERA, which means that when he wasn’t pretty damned spectacular, he was pretty damned lucky. The NL in 1963 had a league ERA of 3.29, and obviously the league finished with a .500 record, so 14-5 is about as good as it gets with a 2.65 ERA. Suppose Koufax went only 10-9 in those games, pitching exactly the same as he did, every single pitch, but the Dodgers didn’t give him the runs he needed to win 4 of those games, so instead of being a little bit lucky, he was a little bit unlucky. That 10-9 record in non-shutout games would reduce his overall record to 21-9, and all his other records would remain the same. A very good year, but not a "Koufax" year. A good, strong Camilo Pascual, Luis Tiant sort of year.

Now that 2.65 ERA in non-shutout games happens to be about what Drysdale’s ERA in 1963 was for the season (2.63) but Drysdale’s actual W-L record was 19-17,  which is right in line with my imagined 10-9 record for Koufax with a 2.65 ERA.  If we take those crucial runs that I’m imagining the Dodgers didn’t score for Koufax and give them to Drysdale, he maybe picks up four more wins and gets saddled with four fewer losses, so now his record is 23-13.

Does Drysdale now win the 1963 Cy Young Award? Probably not—he still has a worser W-L record than Koufax and a much higher ERA, but you know what? I don’t think Koufax wins it now, either.  1963 becomes Juan Marichal’s long-lost missing Cy Young year (25-8, 2.41.). If not his, then Jim Maloney’s (23-7, 2.77) or Spahn’s (also 23-7, 2.60.) Or Ellsworth’s (22-10, 2.11 --in Wrigley!) Or an American Leaguer like Whitey Ford (24-7, 2.74).  (There was only one CY Award back then, kiddies.) The big point is that if you have Koufax and Drysdale pitch exactly as they did, only switching a few hits and outs from Dodger bats in four games for each pitcher-- a Tommy Davis double here, a Wally Moon or Frank Howard homer there-- suddenly Koufax becomes another pitcher entirely, no longer the Magic Man, and Drysdale becomes nearly his equal, both excellent, neither a Cy Young winner. (Drysdale actually won the award the year before, so maybe he still has an edge over Koufax in our minds.)  Every stat in the Dodgers’ 1963 season remains identical—the team’s W-L record, the two pitchers’ stats apart from their W-L records, and the Dodgers’ batters’ stats (the missing Tommy Davis double shows up in Drysdale’s game instead of Koufax’s, of course, and on and on.)  The only different thing is that we don’t think of Koufax as a dominating force any more, nor Drysdale as a Sad Sack who barely pitched above .500 for a pennant-winning team.

Now repeat this exercise for 1965 and 1966, Koufax’s two other Cy Young years. Now his W-L is 22-12 in ’65, and 23-13 in ‘66, while Drysdale’s becomes 27-8 and 17-12.  That probably means no Cy Young Awards for Koufax, ever, while Drysdale picks up his second one with that Koufaxian 27-8 in 1965. (Marichal picks up his second in 1966 with his 25-6 record.) Now with only these 12 career games changed for each man, and not really changed all that much (remember, their pitching stats stay exactly the same, it’s only the Dodgers’ hitting that moves from one to the other), we’re wondering how the hell Koufax posted consistent ERAs under 2, while Drysdale won more games with a higher ERA.

And you know what? I’m pretty sure I have the answer to that baffling mystery, an answer that would have satisfied every one of us: Drysdale could help himself out with the bat, while Koufax was a notorious dead-stick. So of course Double D could win games with a higher ERA! He could drive in a couple of key runs (we would say) when Koufax would be flailing away, able to maybe try an inept bunt but nothing more. Drysdale was The Man!

That would have been the narrative, for sure, and it would have made perfect sense. Not only does Drysdale become the dominant pitcher of the 1960s (or at least tied with Marichal and Gibson, with Koufax in the discussion only on occasion) but the resulting change in their career W-L records also changes how we think of them. Now Koufax is 153-99 lifetime: is that a Hall of Fame record to you? Maybe, but I doubt he gets in on his first try, and I sorta doubt he gets in on his tenth. He’s just another Luis Tiant-type freaky guy who put up some very impressive numbers but not enough of them for long enough. Without those three Cy Youngs, we wouldn’t think nearly as much of him as we do.

But Drysdale! If you give him another Cy Young, plus 12 more wins and 12 fewer losses, his lifetime record become 221-154, a .589 percentage, considerably better than the record of, say, Jim Bunning (224-184, .549) and he’s a mortal lock for the HoF, maybe a first-ballot guy, while Sandy’s on the outside  with his nose pressed to the glass.

I thought when I had this idea (last night at 3 AM in bed, reading the Historical Abstract) that I’d need to provide specific game accounts that turned on a single hit, but then I realized that, no, I didn’t, the principle is obvious enough: every close game I ever saw there was a crucial hit (or out) that just needed to go three feet higher or lower, or right or left, to make a difference in the game’s outcome. But it might be fun to try that, nonetheless, someday. In the low-scoring 1960s, there were so many games that turned on a run or two, and these two guys pitched in many, many one-run games—it seems fun to track them down, but it’s superfluous. All we really need to do, though, is just imagine that the lucky one becomes the unlucky one, and vice versa, and we can then see how our total perceptions change almost completely, and the minutiae gets lost in the overall perception.

We might perceive Koufax as the unluckiest guy wut ever lived, if the numbers shook out like this, and rightly so, but would that change how we regard him as a pitcher? The arguments that some of you are probably composing in your heads right now against this arrant speculation ("Yeah, but Koufax DIDN’T lose the close games, dummy—he won them!") would be the same, only with the names reversed.

Another thing occurs to me would change if we moved some Dodgers’ hits from Koufax’s games to Drysdale’s: not only would their W-L records change but so would opposing pitchers’.  This is a mere blip, in that opposing pitchers varied so much that no one pitcher would be affected much, except for this quotation, also from p. 413 of the first Historical Abstract: "[Drysdale] pitched well when the other guy—usually Juan Marichal, who used to pitch against Drysdale a lot—was pitching a shutout." In other words, if Bill was right about the frequency of Drysdale-Marichal matchups, then Marichal’s W-L record would also be affected, and for the worse, giving Drysdale another slight edge in the Cy Young contests in my alternate 1963, 1965, and 1966 seasons.

Somewhere there’s a butterfly deciding to land on this flower or that one, right this second, someplace on the other side of the world, that will make a huge difference in your grandchildren’s lives. And if it lands on this flower, you’ll never know what would have happened to your grandkids if it landed on that one.