After the 1962 season, knowing that they had Joe Pepitone coming up to play 1st base, the Yankees traded Bill "Moose" Skowron, who had helped them win 7 Pennants and 4 World Series, to the Dodgers for pitcher Stan Williams. Moose made them pay for that in this game, singling home the Dodgers' 1st run in the 2nd inning. This was followed by a single by Dick Tracewski and a home run by John Roseboro. The Dodgers were up 4-0, and the game was effectively over.
Koufax allowed 6 hits and 3 walks, but was completely dominant. He had a perfect game until the 5th inning, when Elston Howard singled. Perhaps the most surprising thing about this game is that Koufax didn't pitch a shutout: Tom Tresh hit a 2-run home run in the 8th, but that's all the Yankees got, losing 5-2.
After the game, in which he did not play, leading up to his retirement as a player and his subsequent hiring to replace Ralph Houk as the Yankees' manager, Yogi Berra said, "I understand how he won 25 games. What I don't understand is how he lost 5."
Koufax was already known to be a great pitcher. But, in those days, the way baseball was covered in the media, sometimes a player needed the spotlight of the World Series to show how great he was. Now, the whole country saw how great Sandy Koufax was.
This game would be referenced in the 1975 film version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, in which the head nurse, Mildred Ratched (Louise Fletcher), won't let the inmates watch it on television, so Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) points them to the unplugged TV, and provides an imaginary broadcast for them. This deviates from the novel by Ken Kesey, because it was published in 1962, before the game in question.
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