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 Cubs marched up to the plate, took their cuts, and marched straight back to the dugout.

Chicago's Bob Hendley was not exactly pitching batting practice either. The Dodgers scratched out a run in the fifth inning on a walk, a sacrifice, a stolen base and an error, but the first hit of the ball game was a bloop double by Los Angeles' Lou Johnson with two out in the seventh. It was also the last. If Koufax didn't know he had a no-hitter going, he must have wondered why nobody talked to him in the dugout. He struck out the side in the eighth, again in the ninth, and when he fogged one last fast ball past Pinchhitter Harvey Kuenn, he danced a little jig on the mound. He had won his 22nd game, 1-0. His 14 strikeouts gave him a total of 332 for the season--just 16 shy of Bob Feller's alltime record. More important, he had become the eighth man in modern baseball history to pitch a perfect game, 27 men up, 27 men down--and the first ever to hurl four no-hitters in his career.

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