By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2018/02/17/wally-moon-rip-a-coliseum-star/

Wally Moon was probably the first Dodgers superstar strictly of Los Angeles. Arriving from the Cardinals for 1959 in a trade, the outfielder soon
became a fan favourite for his smarts, his competence in the outfield, and his patented Moon Shots over the infamous left field high screen in the
hideous (for baseball) Los Angeles Coliseum.

Moon, who died at 87 on 9 February at his Bryan, Texas home, is probably remembered best for three things:

1) Those Moon Shot homers, which he could hit after his former teammate Stan Musial suggested he try an inside-out swing. National League hitters
hit 193 homers at the Coliseum in 1959 and only eight went over the right field fence that bisected a third of the surface that way. Moon hit nine of
his 19 1959 home runs to left field; he’d hit fourteen home runs in the park that year.

2) His unibrow eyebrows, which inspired Bill James (in the decade reviews of The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract) to confer “The Wally
Moon Eyebrows” award upon Gary Gentry, a rookie star on the 1969 Miracle Mets pitching staff. If that’s the sort of thing you look for in a man, be
advised that a short-lived Oriole catcher named Frank Zupo made Moon’s resemble a thin gash across his forehead.

3) His contributions to the Dodgers’ first two World Series winners in Los Angeles.

A solid hitter, Moon was a good outfielder whose play in Game Two of the 1959 World Series prompted no less than Casey Stengel to say it was the key
to the Dodgers’ triumph over the White Sox: he chased Al Smith’s drive to left center and faked catching it, freezing the man on first though the lead
runner scored to make it 4-3, Dodgers, as Moon ran the ball down and hit his cutoff man in time to bag that man on first trying to score. (He also ended
the Series running down and catching Ted Kluszewski’s sinking liner.)

Moon overcame the wrath of Cardinal fans after he took over in left field following the trade of Enos Slaughter to the Yankees for 1954 and became the
National League’s Rookie of the Year with 193 hits. What he’s not normally remembered for, though, is his role in helping turn a certain Hall of Fame
pitcher from nothing special to never better.

Sandy Koufax in spring 1961 was at a crossroads, frustrated by his inconsistent work and only recently tempted to put baseball away for good. Some
biographies even say he considered himself retired until his 1961 contract arrived in the mail, prompting him to sign, telling himself he felt like there
would be a job undone if he didn’t try one more season. Having a pre-season tonsillectomy also forced Koufax to work a little extra to rebuild his muscle
mass.

But he also sought perhaps overdue mechanical help. Dodger statistician Allan Roth, sometimes thought to be a sabermetric grandfather, showed the
intelligent lefthander charts that woke him up to how good he actually was when he was ahead in the count—for all his control issues, hitters were only
hitting .146 against him when he was ahead. When he was behind, they were killing him.

Then Koufax talked to two more people. Pitching coach Joe Becker showed him that his fastball tailed in just enough to lefthanded hitters that they could
pull it to right field more readily than against other lefthanders. And, Moon also challenged Koufax, swearing that he and other hitters in the league knew
what was coming whenever he worked from the stretch.

One Koufax biographer observed that Koufax took the outfielder up on the challenge, having him watch off to the side of a practise mound. Moon called
three quarters of what Koufax threw correctly and pointed out the flaw: when he set his hands out of the stretch high on his chest, the fastball. When he
set them lower, the curve ball. Koufax adjusted appropriately.

(Yu Darvish would show a comparable pitch tipping in Game Seven of last year’s World Series, his glove wiggling a bit when gripping his breaking balls
but staying motionless when gripping his fastball. The Astros caught on and murdered him early.)

That led to the long-fabled evening in a Vero Beach pizza joint where Koufax, reserve catcher Norm Sherry, and Dodger scout Kenny Myers discovered Koufax rearing
back so hard that he often obstructed his sight line to the plate. Once Sherry translated it to, “Sandy, you don’t have to throw so hard,” Koufax went from
promise to Hall of Famer against whom every talented lefthander since has been measured. It only began with smashing the longstanding National League
season’s strikeout record.

Decades later, Moon remembered the peculiarity of shoehorning a baseball field into the Coliseum, where the Dodgers played for their first four Los Angeles
seasons before Dodger Stadium opened.

“Imagine overlaying a baseball diamond atop a football field, with home plate in the corner of one end zone,” he told The Eagle, a publication of his alma
mater Texas A&M. (Moon earned a master’s degree in education there.) That was the layout in the Coliseum. Right field was a long way off, while the left
field line ran just 247 feet to the wall. Because the left-field grandstands were so close, a 40-foot-tall mesh screen was placed there to keep routine fly
balls from becoming home runs.”

With the old Space Race ramping up, and the still-inconsistent Koufax on the mound, Moon stepped in against the Giants in 1959 with the game tied at two.
Still taking Musial’s advice, the lefthanded Moon lofted a soaring pop that in other parks would have been a relatively simple out but in the Coliseum, over
that “Chinese Screen,” became a game-winning home run landing a few rows behind the screen. Scully on radio called it a Moon Shot.

He became a fan favourite from that season through 1963; time and age finally caught up to him by 1965, where he spent the World Series in uniform but
on the bench, and he decided to retire after the season. He moved his wife and children to Arkansas and became the athletic director for a private Christian
college, before returning to professional baseball as a Padres coach and a Dodgers minor league manager, even buying into a franchise in the system (AA-
level San Antonio; Fernando Valenzuela and Orel Hershiser played there while Moon owned the team) but losing considerable money before selling his share
three years later. After managing again briefly in the Yankee and Oriole systems (one of his friends was Roland Hemond), Moon retired from baseball for
good.

Moon retired for keeps to Bryan, Texas. He wrote a memoir and, at the urging of his grandchildren, became just Internet-savvy enough. When the Dodgers
hosted the Red Sox for a charity exhibition game at the Coliseum in 2012, Moon was invited to the festivities and asked playfully whether he’d like to take
one more swing at the old screen. “I haven’t picked up a bat in 30 years, but I’ll take a shot at it,” he replied. “I still play a lot of golf, so I might be able to
get it there.”

A year earlier, Moon reflected on today’s game and thought there was one major difference. “I think the main thing is how all the stadiums have been improved,
with the playing field and the quality of lighting,” he told Los Angeles writer Tom Hoffarth. “I’m closest here to Minute Maid Park in Houston – they have a
retractable roof, a flashing scoreboard, air conditioned? It’s mind-boggling. But it’s all real exciting. I’d sure love to play in today’s game with that kind of
atmosphere. You think back to the lighting we had when it first started – I think a lot of us in the Golden Era would have been a little better hitters if we could
have seen the ball better. It’s like daylight and dark.

“I don’t begrudge any progress. I revel in it,” Moon continued. “But maybe the only negativity about all this is that fans can’t get close to players as much as
they used to. You could go up, shake hands, say hello. Times do change.”

Moon published a memoir, Moon Shots, in 2010. He admitted the Internet wasn’t always simple, but he took to it; his Website is still up and running, maintained
mostly by his family. “I can’t keep up with it, but I’m trying,” he told Hoffarth. “I have a great support team with my children and grandchildren. I have a 12-year-
old grandchild who always tells me, ‘Get with it!’ So I’m turning on the computer. And I even got my wife to be computer literate. You know, I’ve got a 103-year-
old mother in law, and I’m trying to get her on the computer, too. I haven’t got very far with that yet.”

Moon’s wife, Bettye, died last year after a battle with Parkinson’s disease; they were married 64 years with five children and seven grandchildren. Said daughter
LeResa, “They had an amazing marriage.”


Wally Moon, during spring training with
the 1959 Dodgers whom he’d just joined in
a trade from the Cardinals—a suggestion
from Stan Musial helped him survive and
thrive in the insane asylum known as
baseball in the Los Angeles Coliseum.


The Los Angeles Coliseum, when the Dodgers actually played
baseball there. Note the “Chinese Screen” towering atop the left field
wall . . . and the left side foul territory.
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Beautifully and thoughtfully written. Thank you for sharing. 
You clearly appreciate the game and its history, as did your subject. Unibrow and all.

Beautifully and thoughtfully written. Thank you for sharing. 
You clearly appreciate the game and its history, as did your subject. Unibrow and all.

@andy58-in-nh
Flattery will get you everywhere. ;)

@andy58-in-nh
Flattery will get you everywhere. ;)

Ain't that the truth.  That's how I married way over my head, for one thing.

Seriously: there are many baseball writers out there, and sports writers more generally, assigned to cover teams and "beats", who crank out articles like sausage links, but rarely seem to touch on the enduring qualities of the athletes and the historical context of the games that make such contests worth watching and remembering.

I saw Sandy Koufax pitch in a game against the hapless New York Mets in 1964 or '65. I recall that my dad was effusive in his praise of Koufax, not only because he was a fierce adversary, but because he was also Jewish, and had said he wouldn't pitch on Yom Kippur.  I was about 7 years old at the time and couldn't care less, because after only being able to watch Real Baseball Games on a cheap 13-inch black-and-white Japanese TV set, I found myself sitting in a blindingly full-color stadium in the fresh air filled with thousands of cheering people, clutching a hot dog and a pennant and hoping that the day would never end.