Sandy Koufax signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers on December 14, 1954, for a $14,000 bonus; Milwaukee had offered more than twice as much. Under baseball's bonus rule of the time, he never pitched an inning in the minor leagues. He learned on a major league roster, and across his first two seasons he made only twenty-eight appearances.
His first season was a scattering of chances: five starts, two wins and two losses, a 3.02 earned run average in forty-one innings. One of the wins was a two-hit shutout of Cincinnati on August 27, 1955, and another shutout followed a week later, against Pittsburgh.
Across his first two seasons he made twenty-eight appearances. This is the card from between them.
This card came out the next year. The 1956 Topps set has 340 cards, laid out sideways as they had been in 1955, each pairing a large color portrait with a smaller action scene set against a ballpark background, the name and team in a corner and a facsimile signature on the front. Koufax is shown twice, a head-and-shoulders portrait and a figure in motion, in a Brooklyn uniform, in colors a little more muted than his rookie card's, and the facsimile signature across the picture reads “Sanford Koufax.” The cartoon on the back is captioned “An Educated Fast Ball.”
The season it was in packs went no better than the first. He started ten games in 1956, won two and lost four, and his earned run average was 4.91. It would be five more years before it came together.
Cards 1 through 180 of the set exist with gray backs and with white ones. The references disagree about which is the harder to find in the early numbers, and agree that the difference is slight; the white stock is the more brittle of the two. Centering, in both directions, is the usual problem with the set, and a horizontal card shows it plainly.
