When Sandy Koufax owned a West Hollywood motel

Fun item from historian Michael Beschloss: In 1962, Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax invested in a West Hollywood motor inn, which was renamed Sandy Koufax’s Tropicana Motel.

Down Santa Monica Boulevard from the famed Troubadour club, these “74 luxurious air-conditioned rooms” — rented at “popular prices” — came to lodge some of the biggest musical acts of the period: Alice Cooper, Bob Marley, the Mamas and the Papas, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and the Doors. “I don’t know which made me more excited,” said one guest, “to be in Sandy’s motel or to be in a room right beside Sly Stone, from Sly and the Family Stone.”

Beschloss revisits the 1966 incident in which Koufax and teammate Don Drysdale held out together for a higher paycheck from the Dodgers, and how Drysdale — who had his own cocktail lounge in Van Nuys — capitulated. It's in the New York Times' The Upshot column.