Putting Sandy Koufax in a time machine
How many strikeouts would the Dodgers superstar pile up today?
Let’s step into the time machine and retrieve Sandy Koufax from 1966, his final season (and one of his finest).
Just imagine him taking the mound today. Koufax was a strike-throwing machine in an era when strikeouts were much harder to come by. He’d probably have a field day if he were reincarnated in today’s free-swinging environment.
The Dodgers worked Koufax mercilessly during the final six seasons of his 12-year career, three times pushing him past 300 innings. Severe pain in an arthritic elbow forced his retirement at the tender age of 30 in 1966.
Yet he was dominant until the end, winning 27 games and leading the major leagues with 317 strikeouts in that final, agonizing season.
What would Koufax have been like if he had risen to stardom today, rather than six decades ago? We can never know, of course, but we can assume that he would have benefited from a lighter workload and the great advances that have been made in sports medicine.
And we can also play around with some of his statistics, figuring out what their current equivalents might have been.
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Games started
Koufax made 41 starts in 1966, appearing in a quarter of the Dodgers’ 162 contests. (If you want to split hairs, his share was actually 25.3% — a touch more than a quarter.)
His durability was admirable, though not atypical in that era of the four-man rotation. Jim Bunning of the Phillies and Jim Kaat of the Twins also started 41 games that season — sharing the big-league lead with Koufax — and teammate Don Drysdale was only one behind with 40.
Walter Alston, who managed the Dodgers in 1966, rarely had to worry about his rotation. Koufax, Drysdale, Claude Osteen, and Don Sutton started all but eight of the club’s games. Reliever Joe Moeller filled the occasional void by making all eight of those leftover starts, usually when a doubleheader popped up on the schedule.
No manager today would work his starters so hard. The five-man rotation is ubiquitous, and some clubs occasionally beef it up to six men if the load gets heavy.
Divide 162 by five, and you wind up with 32.4 games, which is the expectation for a starter these days. But it’s possible to push the count up to 34 by making creative use of off-days on the schedule. Seven pitchers tied for the major-league lead in 2019 with 34 starts, including Trevor Bauer, Madison Bumgarner, and Justin Verlander. (I’m referring to 2019, of course, because it was the last full season.)
We can safely assume that Koufax would be in their elite category today, so let’s assign him 34 starts.
Innings per start
Cutting the number of starts is only the first step. Today’s pitchers don’t stay in the game as long as their predecessors did in the 1960s, so we need to trim the average number of innings per start.
A total of 2,429 games were played in 2019, which means there were 4,858 starting pitchers. Only 45 — just 0.9% — managed to pitch complete games. Shane Bieber of the Indians and Lucas Giolito of the White Sox tied for the lead with three CGs apiece.
Compare that to 1966, when Koufax alone pitched 27 complete games — topping the majors, of course — followed by Juan Marichal of the Giants with 25 and Bob Gibson of the Cardinals with 20. Those three superstars accounted for 72 CGs, outstripping the 2019 big-league total by 27.
Such endurance naturally yielded enormous inning counts. Koufax worked 323 innings in 1966. Three other workhorses joined him in the 300-plus club: Bunning (314), Marichal (307), and Kaat (305).
Verlander set the pace in 2019, working 223 innings. That put him 31.0% below Koufax’s total, a disparity partly attributable to the variance in the number of starts they made.
If we calculate their average workloads, the gap narrows. Koufax worked 7.88 innings per start in 1966, while Verlander lasted 6.56 innings per start in 2019, a difference of 16.8%.
If we assume that Koufax would be given slightly more leeway today — a fairly safe guess — we can reduce his innings per start by, say, 15%.
Total innings
The 1966 multiplication for Koufax was 41 GS times 7.88 IP/GS, which yielded 323 innings pitched.
If we reduce his starts by seven and his innings per start by 15%, we wind up with 228 innings. That’s 95 fewer than his actual total — and it puts him in the ballpark with Verlander’s 2019 total of 223 innings.
And why not? Both men won the Cy Young Award in their respective seasons, and both led the majors in wins, starts, and innings pitched. They weren’t the same pitcher — nobody’s saying that — but Justin Verlander was the closest substitute that 2019 had for Sandy Koufax in his prime.
Other statistics
What about Koufax’s other stats? What numbers might he accumulate in 228 innings today, rather than 323 innings in 1966? Nobody knows for sure, but let’s take a stab at a couple of answers.
Wins. Koufax notched 27 victories in 1966, the most in any of his 12 seasons. He got the decision in 36 of his 41 starts (87.8%), going 27-9 overall.
But the opportunities wouldn’t be the same today, not with managers using a quicker hook. The seven pitchers who tied for the 2019 lead in GS received a W or an L in just 69.3% of their appearances. If that standard applied to a 34-start Koufax today, his record would be something like 18-6.
Strikeouts. Koufax led the majors with 317 strikeouts in 1966, an average of 8.8 per nine innings. That was an amazing accomplishment at a time when the typical pitcher recorded just 5.8 strikeouts in a full game.
Times have changed, of course. The big-league average soared 53% to 8.9 strikeouts per nine innings by 2019, actually exceeding Koufax’s extraordinary performance 53 years earlier. If his personal average also rose by 53%, he’d be recording 13.5 strikeouts per nine innings today, which would give him a total of 342 in 228 innings.
Nobody in 2019 actually matched such a hypothetical performance. A pair of Astros came closest: Gerrit Cole with 326 and Verlander with 300.
The question of money
The Dodgers paid the 30-year-old Koufax $125,000 for his 27-9 record and 317 strikeouts in 1966. What might they have to shell out to an 18-6, 342-strikeout equivalent today?
Look to Gerrit Cole for an answer. He was 29 years old in 2019, when he went 20-5 with 326 strikeouts for the Astros. Those are Koufax-like numbers on the present-day scale, and they paid off handsomely on the free-agent market. The Yankees showered him with a nine-year, $324 million contract.
Koufax, of course, had similar stats when his 1966 numbers were adjusted to 2019 conditions. But he also brought a much strongest history, including three Cy Young Awards and a Most Valuable Player Award, trophies that Cole lacks to this day.
Imagine what bidders would pay on the open market for such excellence. Then consider Koufax’s actual earnings, as reported by Baseball-Reference.com.
The Dodgers superstar — the greatest pitcher of his generation — was paid slightly more than $431,000 during his entire career.