Sandy's fastball was so fast, some batters would start to swing as he was on his way to the mound.

Jim Murray, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Los Angeles sports columnist, was famous for hyperbolic one-liners that captured an athlete’s aura more than measurable fact. This quip refers to Sandy Koufax, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ left-handed ace whose peak (especially 1963–1966) made him a near-mythic figure in baseball writing. Murray’s line belongs to the tradition of sports-column exaggeration used to convey Koufax’s intimidating velocity and the helplessness he induced in hitters—an effect amplified by Koufax’s late-breaking curveball and his reputation for dominance in big games. The joke imagines batters so overmatched they must begin their swing before Koufax even begins his delivery.

The sentence is a comic impossibility: no pitch can be so fast that hitters must swing while the pitcher is still walking to the mound. Murray uses that absurdity to translate raw speed into felt experience—panic, anticipation, and futility. The line also points to a deeper truth about elite pitching: success is not only velocity but the batter’s perception of time. Koufax’s combination of pace, deception, and sharp breaking stuff made hitters feel rushed, as if the ball arrived before they could decide. Murray’s exaggeration thus becomes a metaphor for psychological dominance: Koufax controlled the at-bat so completely that the hitter’s best chance was to guess early and hope.