Don Drysdale’s Hall of Fame Career

Orlando Cepeda, a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, once had this to say about batting against the Dodgers’ Don Drysdale. “The trick about hitting against Don Drysdale is to hit him before he hits you.” Don Drysdale still holds the National League mark for most hit batsmen, with 154, and he was not shy about knocking a batter or two down if they tried to crowd the plate. “When the ball is over the middle of the plate, the batter is hitting it with the sweet part of the bat. When it’s inside, he’s hitting it with the part of the bat from the handle to the trademark,” is how Don Drysdale explained hitting. “When it’s outside, he’s hitting it with the end of the bat. You’ve got to keep the ball away from the sweet part of the bat. To do that, the pitcher has to move the hitter off the plate.” And this was Don Drysdale’s philosophy about pitching. Of course, it helped that Don Drysdale was a six-foot six right-hander and had an overpowering fastball!

Don Drysdale came to the Brooklyn Dodgers at the age of nineteen in 1956 and went 5-5 while working out of the bullpen and occasionally starting. On June 5th, 1957, Don Drysdale tossed the first of what would be 49 shutouts in the big leagues when he blanked the Cubbies by a 4-0 count. In what would be the Dodgers last season in Brooklyn, Don Drysdale went 17-9. The team jumped to the West Coast in 1958, and Don Drysdale slumped to a 12-13 record. He improved to 17-13 the following campaign, and the Dodgers made their first World Series appearance as a Los Angeles based squad when they met the Chicago White Sox in October. Don Drysdale pitched Game Three and emerged victorious; despite allowing eleven hits in seven innings, he gave up just one run. The Dodgers won the Series in six games.

The Dodgers of the early Sixties were a team that did not score many runs, and they depended on their now formidable duo of Don Drysdale and the fabulous Sandy Koufax to keep opponent’s bats at bay. Don Drysdale could go just 15-14 in 1960 and 13-10 in 1961, despite allowing fewer hits than innings pitched and having a good ERA during those years. In 1962, Don Drysdale had his best season, winning 25 games and losing only 9 to capture the Cy Young Award. Don Drysdale led the league in strikeouts for the third and last time of his career with 232 and 1962 was the first of four consecutive years that he made more starts in the National League than anyone else. Always a workhorse, Don Drysdale would make 40 or more starts in a season nine straight years. The Dodgers came up short down the stretch in ’62 after losing Koufax to a circulatory ailment in his fingers. Los Angeles went 3-10 in their last thirteen games while the Giants came from behind to force a three game playoff for the pennant. The Giants defeated the Dodgers two games to one to keep them out of the post-season.

1963 was a different story, as the Dodgers won the pennant by six games despite their offense. Don Drysdale won 19 but lost 17, even though his earned run average was slightly over three runs per game. Koufax went a ridiculous 25-5 to win the Cy Young, and the Dodgers squared off with the Yankees in a highly anticipated Fall Classic. By the time Don Drysdale took the hill in Game Three, Los Angeles already had a two games to none lead, as Koufax and Johnny Podres had dominated the New York hitters. Don Drysdale got a first inning run to work with thanks to an RBI single by Tommy Davis, and it turned out to be all he needed as he threw a three hit shutout, striking out nine. When Koufax beat Whitey Ford 2-1 the next day, Don Drysdale was a World Champion for the second time.

After winning 18 games in 1964, Don Drysdale won 23 in 1965 and the Dodgers went once more to the Series, this time against the Twins. Both Don Drysdale and Koufax were beaten in their initial starts as Minnesota jumped to a 2-0 Series advantage, but both hurlers came back to win next time out and the Dodgers won the next four games for another title. In 1966 Los Angeles edged out the Giants for yet another NL flag, but they were swept away by the Orioles in the World Series when they scored a total of two runs in the four contests. Two of the losses went to Don Drysdale; in one he pitched poorly but in the other he threw a four hitter, but lost 1-0.

Koufax retired after the 1966 season with elbow problems, leaving Don Drysdale to carry on. Only Bob Gibson of the Cardinals was in a class with Don Drysdale when it came to backing hitters off of the plate. Mike Shannon of St. Louis joked that “Don Drysdale considered an intentional walk a waste of three pitches. If he wants to put you on base, he can hit you with one pitch.” This was not far from the truth. If a Dodger batter ever got dusted off or hit by an opposing moundsman, Don Drysdale had a simple mantra. “My own little rule was two for one. If one of my teammates got knocked down, then I knocked down two on the other team.” He always pitched as if batters were trying to steal his most prized possessions. “I hate all hitters. I start a game mad and I stay that way until it’s over. The pitcher has to find out if the hitter is timid, and if he is timid, he has to remind the hitter he’s timid.”
On May 14th, 1968 Don Drysdale began an incredible string of shutout innings against NL teams. He shut out the Cubs 1-0 that day, and then blanked Houston 1-0 in his next outing. Don Drysdale then proceeded to whitewash St. Louis and then Houston again to equal the National League record for consecutive strike outs. He broke it his next start when he stopped the Giants 3-0. The streak appeared over in the ninth inning of that tilt when he hit a batter with the bases loaded, but the umpire ruled that the hitter did not try to avoid the pitch and he later popped out. When Don Drysdale throttled the Pirates on June 4th by a score of 5-0, he broke the NL record for most shutouts in a row and Carl Hubbell’s mark of 54 straight scoreless innings. On June 8th, the Phillies’ Howie Bedell knocked in a run against Don Drysdale with a sacrifice fly in the fifth inning to stop the skein at 58 2/3rds innings without allowing a run, snapping Walter Johnson’s major league mark of 56 set in 1913. Ironically, it was the only run that Bedell knocked in all year, his season lasting only nine games before he was sent back to the minors. Amazingly, Don Drysdale only went 14-12 in 1968, despite his 2.15 ERA, as the eighth place Dodgers hit just .230 as a team.

Don Drysdale was one of the best hitting pitchers of all time, belting 29 home runs in his career to rank second in league history behind Warren Spahn. He led NL hurlers in homers four times, twice tying the record of seven in one season, and was often used as a pinch-hitter. In 1965, Don Drysdale was the only Dodger to bat .300, and he had 19 RBI, more than several of the Dodger position players. After he tore the rotator cuff in his right shoulder in 1969, Don Drysdale had to call it quits. He was only 31, and such an injury today could be repaired surgically, but not back then. Don Drysdale had a career record of 209-166, and his 2,486 strikeouts rank him 28th on the all-time list. His number 53 was retired by the Dodgers and became a broadcaster for several teams after he was done playing.

Orel Hershiser was approaching the scoreless inning streak of Don Drysdale in 1988 as the season wound down. He needed to throw ten scoreless innings in the finale against the Padres, and when the Dodgers failed to score, Hershiser did just that, establishing a new record as Don Drysdale looked on; he was one of the first to congratulate Hershiser. Don Drysdale married Basketball Hall of Famer Ann Meyers, the first time that two Hall of Famers from different sports were wed, as Don Drysdale went into Cooperstown in 1984. Tragically, Don Drysdale passed away from a massive heart attack in 1993, not yet 57 years old, a pitcher so feared by hitters that the Pirates’ Dick Groat once claimed “Hitting against Don Drysdale was like making a date with a dentist.”