October 6, 1966: The Smoggy Sendoff of Sandy Koufax

Sandy Koufax (left) and Jim Palmer

October 6, 1966: Game 2 of the World Series. Los Angeles Dodger outfielder Willie Davis, having trouble seeing a white baseball against the smog-gray Los Angeles sky, commits 3 errors in 1 inning, enabling the Baltimore Orioles to win 6-0, and take both World Series games at Dodger Stadium, and head back to Memorial Stadium with a 2-0 lead.

Jim Palmer, days short of his 21st birthday, outduels Sandy Koufax, who struggles with the Oriole bats, Davis' fielding, and the pain in his elbow.

Koufax has told only a few people yet, but he's already decided that this is his last major league game. He is not yet 31. This could be called a "generational hinge" game. To put it another way: Koufax had won 169 games, including 4 in the World Series, but would never win another; Palmer, if you count this game, had won 21, and 255 more would follow.

To this day, the Orioles have never won a Pennant without Palmer on their staff. But they won 6 with him, including the 1966, 1970 and 1983 World Series. He is the only pitcher to win a World Series game in 3 different decades. His 186 wins during the 1970s made him the winningest pitcher of the decade. By a weird coincidence, the scout who discovered him was Hal Newhouser, whose 170 wins during the 1940s made him the winningest pitcher of that decade.

Many American cities have had, and some still have, smog issues, due to topography. New York's used to be bad, up until the 1970s, when the effects of the environmental movement helped. Denver's is bad, because of the Rocky Mountains.

But Los Angeles is widely known for smog, because it's the American city most identified with driving as opposed to public transportation, and all that car exhaust flies east with the prevailing wind in the Northern Hemisphere, and runs smack into the San Gabriel Mountains, trapping it. To make matters worse, the city gets an average of only an inch and a quarter of rain per month.

On July 26, 1943, the smog in L.A. was so bad! (How bad was it?) It was so bad, people began calling the police, thinking that the Japanese were conducting chemical warfare as part of their effort in World War II. The Japanese military never developed anything like that, but America didn't know that at the time, and it had only been 25 years since World War I and Imperial Germany's use of poison gas..

On October 21, 1954, the smog in L.A. was so bad, the City actually closed its public schools for several days.

On October 16, 10 days after this World Series game, comedian Allan Sherman appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Sherman, a Chicago native famed as a game show producer and a song parodist -- the "Weird Al" Yankovic of his time, many of his rewrites reflecting his Jewish heritage -- mentioned that he once lived in the L.A. suburb of Van Nuys, and sang this, to the tune of "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes": 

They ask me through the years

why I shed these tears.

I, of course, replies:

When you live in Van Nuys

smog gets in your eyes.

I thought I'd play it wise

so I closed my eyes.

Then, what do you suppose?

When both my eyes I close

smog got in my nose.

I went to price

an anti-smog device

to fit behind my car.

But, all too quick

the smog became so thick

I could not find my car.

Ten thousand cars provide
carbon monoxide.
If they’d all drive a horse
there’d be no smog, of course…
But there’d be something worse!

In 1971, on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, taped outside Los Angeles in what they mockingly called "Beautiful Downtown Burbank," co-host Dan Rowan saiid this as part of his regular "News of the Future" sketch: "Los Angeles, two years from now: Race relations were solved in Los Angeles, when the smog became so thick, nobody could tell what anybody's color was!" (That didn't happen in 1973, but the city did elect its 1st black Mayor that year, Tom Bradley.)

The founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the passage of the Clean Air Act, both in 1970, helped. So did an additional Clean Air Act in 1990. L.A.'s last Stage 1 Smog Alert was in 1974; its last Stage 2 Smog Alert, in 1988. Then again, the American Lung Association still ranked L.A. as the nation's most-polluted city as recently as 2013.

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October 6, 1966 was a Thursday. Also on this day, LSD was declared illegal throughout the United States. And Irish soccer star Niall Quinn was born.

Football was in midweek. The NBA season wouldn't start for another  9 days; the NHL season, for another 13. Therefore, there were no other scores on this historic day.