Doyel: Sandy Koufax made the Hall of Fame, but not this semi-pro team in Oldenburg, Indiana
Gregg DoyelOLDENBURG – Some of the people in this story, the strangest Sandy Koufax story ever told, are dead, and those still alive aren’t much more help. Some remember it one way, some another, and the only living person who could clear it up isn’t answering letters or returning calls.
We could start this story anywhere. There’s that tiny old arena at the University of Cincinnati, Schmidlapp Gymnasium, where Koufax is standing under the basket with a basketball in each hand, springing up and dunking each one. There’s the ballfield just north of Batesville, Indiana, with the chicken-wire backstop and the nuns buried nearby. There’s the old tavern in Franklin County, on Water Street, where Charlie Koester had to answer the question over and over.
But we should probably start at a funeral 30 years ago, when a man was buried and took with him the truth of that summer day in 1954 when the semi-pro baseball team in Oldenburg, Indiana, decided not to sign future Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax.
Dairy farmer told Sandy Koufax: No
Back when the dairy farm started, Charlie Koester was working for his dad, bottling the milk by hand and delivering it by horse-and-buggy to the good folks of Batesville. This was the Great Depression and Charlie was in his 20s, working the 200 acres his dad, a German immigrant named Robert Koester, had purchased for $2 an acre.
Charlie bought the farm from his dad and continued the work even as he was selling off pieces of the 200 acres. Batesville High, located at the corner of Huntersville Road and State Road 46 since 1968, is on old man Koester’s land. Same for the back nine at Hillcrest Golf and Country Club, built in 1987, and Batesville Primary School in 1991.
Charlie Koester was a first-generation German-American in a community teeming with German immigrants, and he had a way with people. So many stories at his wake at Meyers Funeral Home in 1992, like the older woman who told Charlie’s three sons about the time her family had gotten mad at Charlie. Why, they’d asked him, did he bring their milk so late in the day?
“You can’t think of it that way,” Charlie had replied. “I’m bringing tomorrow’s milk today.”
Doyel: 'Greatest game ever pitched' starred Sandy Koufax ... and my high school coach
She finished the story: “We were never mad at him again.”
That was Charlie. When he was alive, nursing a beer in the 1980s at the tavern at Water Street in Oldenburg, townsfolk who’d heard the rumors for 30 years would pull up a stool and ask if it was true:
Did you really cut Sandy Koufax?
Charlie would laugh, because what else can you do? Get defensive, or try to explain what really happened? Nobody wanted the real story. They wanted the myth, the legend, the time someone told Sandy Koufax he wasn’t good enough to pitch for the Oldenburg Villagers of the Tri-County Baseball League.
The bar would fill in up in those days, people enjoying the company of Charlie Koester, and that includes Gary Moorman, who retired recently after 14 years as the boys basketball coach at Oldenburg Academy. Friends know Gary as “Ace Jr.” His dad is Ace Moorman Sr., a legendary athlete at Batesville High who’d played basketball at Cincinnati one year after Koufax.
Ace Sr. plays a role in this, and we’ll visit with him shortly, but Ace Jr. is trying to tell us something important about Charlie Koester, one of the central characters in this Sandy Koufax story.
“You’d be having a beer with Charlie, and somebody was always mentioning Sandy Koufax to him,” Ace Jr. says. “He’d look at me and say, ‘That’s question No. 10,000 on that topic.’ Nobody could handle it better than Charlie, who was known all those years as the guy who didn’t let Sandy Koufax pitch. He’d laugh it off and enjoy it.
“It was a never-ending story, and there were so many versions. I’m sure after all those years it was hard for everybody to keep track of what actually transpired.”
True that. It’s been nearly 75 years ago, and we’re still trying to figure it out. One possible answer came at his wake in 1992, when it seemed all of Batesville paraded through Meyers Funeral Home, many of them asking his three boys:
Is it true? About Sandy Koufax?
USAF had no chance vs. Koufax
So many versions of the same story.
You’d think Bob Koester Jr. would know. He’s the middle of Charlie Koester's three sons. Bob heard the story many times, straight from the source.
You’d think Ace Moorman Sr. would know. He transferred to Cincinnati from Kansas State in 1954 to play for the UC basketball team, the guy who saw Koufax in that campus gym, standing under a basket and dunking two balls. He's the guy who invited Koufax to Oldenburg to play against rival Sunman. He is a source.
You’d think Jim Placke would know. His dad played for Oldenburg in 1954, and as a boy Jim warmed up Sandy Koufax before the tryout. Well, he’s pretty sure that was Sandy Koufax. He was 10, a catcher in little league. His dad always told him that was Koufax.
More in baseball history:Dodgers icon and Indiana native Gil Hodges belongs in the Hall of Fame. Is this the year?
So many versions, and Ace Moorman Sr. tells a good one. First, understand something. Ace Sr. is nearing 90. He’s seen a thing or two, heard a thing or two, and he says the Sandy Koufax story is “overblown.” But he’ll tell it with a sigh, for the millionth time, if it’ll finally set the record straight.
“No,” he says, “Sandy Koufax was never down here.”
Ace Sr. says one part is true, that Koufax was asked to come from UC to Oldenburg for a tryout. He’d know, because he’s the one who asked. This was 1954, and Ace was buddies with former UC basketball star Jim Holstein, a Minneapolis Lakers forward who’d played some minor league ball. Ace had played baseball at Batesville, where he’d graduated in 1953 with the basketball team’s record for points in a season (461).
Ace and Holstein were talking that spring about playing in the Tri-County League, for the Oldenburg team managed by Charlie Koester. They mentioned another two-sport guy, the freshman Koufax, a left-handed pitcher who wasn’t much for control but sure could make that ball hum. Ace remembers a UC exhibition game against a team from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, featuring pro ballplayers who’d been drafted for the Korean War. Ace says Koufax walked the first three U.S. Airmen he faced, then struck out the next three on nine pitches.
Not long after that, Ace and Jim Holstein invited Koufax to Oldenburg for a tryout. And then, Ace says, they ran it past Koester.
Oldenburg practiced Thursday nights on a field up the hill, overlooking Harvey’s Branch Creek. Holy Family Cemetery collected foul balls off the bats of right-handed hitters, and a little farther away was the Sisters of St. Francis. The Franciscan convent has been around since 1851, its nuns buried in the cemetery nearby.
The nuns had started Oldenburg Academy in 1851, and over time carved a baseball field into the school grounds. By 1954 the backstop was held together with chicken wire, with the bleachers close behind. That’s an important detail as it relates to a young, wild Sandy Koufax who was in the process of throwing 32 innings as a UC freshman, striking out 51 and walking 30.
“I told Charlie there might be a possibility we can get Sandy to come to Oldenburg,” Ace Sr. says, “but I said we have two problems. One, I don’t think we have anybody who can catch him, and secondly, that little chicken wire at the back of the backstop, that isn’t going to stop him either.”
The game with Sunman was two days away. After practice Charlie and the other Oldenburg coach, Joe Giesting, talked it out at the local pub.
“They came back out and said, ‘Well, we thought it over, and for safety sake, for everybody, maybe we better not,’” Ace Sr. says. “And that is the story of how Sandy almost came over here – but he never, ever made it.”
That’s one version, for sure.
Koufax gets loose with kid catcher
They’d get big crowds at the Tri-County Baseball League, little towns like Milan, New Alsace and Yorkville coming out for games every Sunday from April to October. Nobody drew bigger crowds than Oldenburg, famous for fried chicken and German beer.
Players in the Tri-County League signed contracts. Not for the money, but the commitment.
“You couldn’t just pick up and leave if they signed you for a few years,” Ace Moorman Jr. says. “My dad left Oldenburg to play for Batesville, and that was news.”
Those contracts are another important detail, because Sandy Koufax wanted $100 to play for Oldenburg and the team didn’t have it. That’s another version of the story, anyway, and no, it doesn’t jibe with Ace Sr.’s version. But that’s what Charlie Koester told folks who asked if he was the knucklehead who cut Sandy Koufax. And it’s the story his boys told at their old man’s funeral in 1992.
It also jibes with a story told by Jim Placke, about the day he went with his dad to a Thursday practice and found himself, at age 10, warming up a certain hard-throwing lefty.
“At some point during batting practice, Charlie told Sandy Koufax to get loosened up, and he could throw some batting practice,” says Placke, 75, a retired accountant from Hill-Rom. “Charlie knew I was a Little League catcher. At that time, Sandy Koufax wasn’t famous. My father passed onto me that, yes, I did throw some toss with Koufax. I remember doing it. I just didn’t know who it was.”
More from Doyel:Baseball needs more days like this, so we can remember why we fell in love
Bob Koester has lived in Batesville his whole life, which means he’s heard the Sandy Koufax story a lot, and told it more times than that. He says the true version isn’t so different from the one told by Ace Moorman Sr.
“Everybody’s always teasing me: ‘Your dad cut Sandy Koufax because he threw too hard and was too wild!’” says Koester, who owns Tudor Square Realty in Batesville. “And that was accurate – he did. But Dad said the truth of it was they couldn’t afford him. He wanted $100 a game, and they didn’t have the money to pay him.
“And he threw so hard and wild, and my dad was a catcher, and he’d say, ‘We didn’t know if we could catch him.’”
A story this good spreads. Ace Moorman Jr. was teaching English almost 20 years ago at Ben Davis High, eating lunch at a nearby restaurant, when Speedway athletic director Ron Probst came in with a group. Probst had grown up in Sunman.
“Ron saw me and said: ‘Tell these people the Sandy Koufax story!’” Ace Jr. says.
Which version? Or does it matter? The Tri-County League fizzled out around 1980. Charlie Koester died in 1992, and his coaching colleague, Joe Giesting, died in 2015.
The only person sure to know the whole story is Sandy Koufax, who went straight from UC to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1955 – no minor leagues for him – and retired in 1966 at age 30. He’s a decent but private man, and it was no surprise to Bob Koester when he received no response from Koufax to a note he’d sent the Dodgers after his dad died in 1992.
“I tried so hard,” Bob Koester says. “We were hoping to get a couple baseballs signed: ‘Charlie, why’d you cut me?’”
That remains the question, and it looks as though we’ll never know the answer. It’s probably better that way.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.