Dave Stewart's Look Was a Gift From Hall of Fame Lefty Sandy Koufax

Dodgers great Sandy Koufax broke his usual media silence to talk with theathletic.com about how he helped mentor Dave Stewart, who was become a four-time 20-game winners with the Athletics.

To watch Dave Stewart pitch in the 1980s and early 1990s, you would think he invented The Look.

You know The Look, baseball cap pulled down so low that the hitter couldn’t really see his eyes. The Look helped to instill fear. Stewart won 20 games or more three years in a row and was the Most Valuable Player in 1989 World Series.

What you may not know is that Stewart didn’t invent that look. It was a gift from Hall of Fame Dodgers’ lefty Sandy Koufax as was pointed out today by Alex Coffey in theathletic.com.

Koufax talks to the media almost never. In Jane Leavy’s terrific book, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, Leavy orchestrated 469 interviews. None of them was with Koufax, who has a bit of J.D. Salinger in him and doesn’t take much to interviews. (Koufax encouraged others to talk to Leavy, however, and she produced a classic).

But Coffey got him to talk about Stewart, a pitcher Koufax worked with repeatedly in the 1970s and early 1980s when Stewart was with the Dodgers. It came out that Koufax was the one who came up with Stewart’s ever-menacing low-cap look and the no-emotion look that came up with it.'

Koufax, a three-time Cy Young Award winner, suggested the cap be lowered “as low as you can and see what happens.”

Stewart said he couldn’t see the catcher’s head. He could, however, see the catcher’s mitt, and the word from Koufax was “throw to what you’re seeing.”

That was the start of Stewart throwing more strikes than balls, and while it would take another five years for Stewart to break into national prominence with the help of a sinking forkball that Koufax and Stewart had worked on in 1982 but that his subsequent teams, the Rangers and the Phillies, wouldn’t let him throw.

The A’s picked him up in May of 1986 after Stewart had been released by the Phillies. He mostly sat in the A’s bullpen until Tony La Russa joined the team midseason as manager. La Russa took over with the A’s in Boston on July 7. He wanted a new look and he and pitching coach Dave Duncan believed Stewart would bring that.

All Stewart did that day was beat Roger Clemens, who would win not only the Cy Young Award that season but also the MVP. Clemens was 14-1 before Stewart beat him that Monday and would finish 24-4. It wouldn’t be a fluke. From the day the A’s picked Stewart up through 1990, Stewart went 9-0 head-to-head against Clemens. No pitcher of that era came close to matching that against the seven-time Cy Young winner.

Beginning with that July 7 game, Stewart, who’d made one start the first three months of the season, was in an instant transformed into the ace of the Oakland rotation. He’d go 9-5 in 19 games (16 starts) the rest of the way, then began his run of 20-win seasons the next year.

He wasn’t Sandy Koufax. He wasn’t supposed to be. He was Dave Stewart,

Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3

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