Remember This? Contract Holdout — 1966
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In today’s era of Major League Baseball with it’s free agency, huge, humongous long-term, incentive-laden contracts, arbitration, etc. it’s hard to imagine a player-holdout ending with contracts barely into 6 figures.
But that is exactly what happened 41 years ago today in 1966 with Los Angeles Dodgers pitching stars Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale.
Baseball Library records that on February 28, 1966 Koufax and Drysdale,
“Seeking an unprecedented 3-year‚ $1.05 million contract to be divided evenly‚ …begin a joint holdout.” In mid-March, they threatened joint retirement and signed movie contracts. But, on March 30, they ended what was a 32 day holdout signing for $130‚000 and $105‚000 respectively.
Koufax went on to have one of his greatest seasons in 1966 finishing with a 27-9 record, a 1.73 ERA, 27 complete games, 323 innings pitched and 317 strikeouts, down from 382 strikeouts in the previous season.
Drysdale didn’t do nearly as well, finishing with a 13-16 mark, a 3.42 ERA, 11 complete games, 279 innings pitched and 177 strikeouts. But the tandum was still one of the most potent in baseball and the Dodgers eeked out their perennial rivals, the San Francisco Giants for the NL Pennant by 1 1/2 games.
However, the Dodgers didn’t fare well in the 1966 World Series
as their AL opponents, the Baltimore Orioles, who had some pretty fair hurlers themselves in Jim Palmer, Dave McNally, Steve Barber and Wally Bunker, shocked the Dodgers with a 4 game sweep of the series.
The Dodgers, who had temporarily replaced the Yankees in the mid-1960s as MLB’s dynasty, managed no offensive production at all in the 1966 World Series.
The Orioles had defeated baseball’s newest dynasty and they had done it with less-than-spectacular stats. In the end, their scorecards totaled a meager twenty-four hits and ten earned runs in four games. However, the Dodger’s boasted an even lower total (setting an all-time record) with two runs, seventeen hits, a .142 batting average and pathetic thirty-three consecutive scoreless innings.
As for Koufax and Drysdale, Baseball Library records that;
Koufax achieved success despite physical problems. A mysterious circulatory ailment in his pitching arm cost him half a season in 1962. Another arm injury in 1964 shortly led to an arthritic pitching elbow. After a 27-9 record in 1966, he retired at age thirty-one rather than risk crippling his arm. Five years later he became the youngest man to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame and only the sixth to achieve the honor in his first year of eligibility.
Drysdale, who in 1968 set a record hurling 6 consecutive shutouts enroute to a then record 58 2/3 scoreless innings, retired in August, 1969 after a right shoulder injury.
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