Catching Up with Joey Jay, Part II

Joseph Richard Jay, born in 1935 in Middletown, Connecticut, should be a familiar name to anyone who followed National League baseball in the 1950s and 1960s. Better known as Joey Jay, he broke into the big leagues as a 17-year-old and pitched as a member of the Milwaukee Braves from 1953-1960. A trade sent him to the Cincinnati Reds, where he enjoyed his success from 1961-1966. A 21-game winner in 1961 and 1962, Jay made his lone All-Star appearance in 1961, and started and won Game 2 of the World Series against the New York Yankees. Just one win shy of 100 for his career, Jay retired in 1966 due to arm injuries after a brief stint with the Atlanta Braves. In 2008, he earned an induction into the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame. A resident of the Tampa Bay area, Jay recently took some time to talk about his memorable playing career. The following is the second of a two-part interview with Joey Jay.

Q. So was it your connection with the Reds that brought you here to Tampa?

A. No, actually we moved to Tampa while I was still with the Braves. They were training in Bradenton. I can’t remember all the circumstances, but we actually lived in Lutz because we found a piece of property we liked. We went into the chicken business at the time (laughs). We were raising chickens. It just happened to work out that we already had a home nearby when I got traded to the Reds, who had their training headquarters here.

Q. In Milwaukee, you got to play with a young Hank Aaron, and when you were traded to Cincinnati, Pete Rose had just come on the scene. What are your memories of a young Pete Rose?

A. I remember him very well when he came up. Charlie Hustle! I was always impressed with his hustle. I mean he had a lot of enthusiasm and that impressed everyone. I got to play with him early in his career. I also saw Johnny Bench when he first came up. I didn’t get to play with him, but he was in our Spring Training camp. He was very impressive as a young man, and saw that the Reds had the making of a great future.

Q. You finished your career with the Braves in 1966, their first season in Atlanta.

A. Yeah, I got traded back there. I was having arm trouble and that was just a stop on the way out. I think they got me back out of sentiment, probably. The years I was in Cincinnati, I had very good success against the Braves. When we’d go to Milwaukee to play them, the writers always tried to extract some kind of story out of me that would show some bitterness. I never gave them the satisfaction, because I really did have a lot of respect for the Braves. They treated me well and a trade was just part of the business, so I never said anything bad against them. So I think that was kind of their way of paying me back by giving me that last chance. My arm was giving me a lot of trouble, and they didn’t have the sports medicine back then that they do today. I just wasn’t able to recover. So I retired at 30 years old, which was kind of young.

Q. What did you do with your life after you left baseball?

A. A bit of everything. We lived in New York, all over the country really. I’ve done different things. We raised cattle for a while. At one point, I owned a taxi cab company in West Virginia. Back then, you had to have another career. Even during the off-season, players were working on other careers. It wasn’t the pay scale they have today where you can afford to train year-round. So after I got out of baseball, I just started another life.

Q. Do you still keep up with the game today?

A. In the sense that I still watch it on television. I don’t keep in touch with the players too much. We’ve been dispersed all over the country. But baseball has a fraternity, and I belong to it. I don’t follow it as closely as I used to, but I still keep up with it. I enjoy watching the local team, the Rays. They’re a great team and very exciting. I watched them a lot last year. Cincinnati honored me with the (team) Hall of Fame induction last year, so I keep in touch with them a little bit. They offer to bring me up there occasionally for appearances and things like that. Other than that, I’m basically retired.

Q. Do you have any thoughts on the so-called “Steroid Era” of baseball? As a one-time teammate of Hank Aaron, was it hard to see his record broken in what may have been a dirty manner?

A. It’s nothing I know anything about, really. I’m not an expert in the field. I don’t know what steroids do. I know they don’t hit the ball for you. They don’t perform for you. As I understand it, they enhance your physical ability to some degree. It seems they enhance a player's strength, so I suppose that equates into hitting more home runs. I don’t really know that for a fact, though if you look at the statistics home runs have gone down now.

There are other things that are involved too. When Henry Aaron played, I don’t know what he did in the off-season, but most of us players had jobs. Now, the players train all year 'round. They can do that because of their contracts. The training and medicine available is better too. In my day, I probably could have pitched another six years with what’s available today.

There have been other controversies in baseball, such as the live ball era. There were years when the ball was dead, then all of a sudden you had a lot of home runs, so they’d accuse them of livening the ball up.

You look at the Pittsburgh Pirates. They moved the fence at Forbes Field about 30 feet in for Hank Greenberg. They called it “Greenberg’s Gardens.” Ralph Kiner ended up taking advantage of it. So there were all those things going on, but steroids are not a good thing. I don’t mean to sound like I’m glossing over it. Still, I blame the players less than I blame leadership in baseball. They should have come out more strongly against it. They either didn’t know what they were doing, or didn’t know the so-called force of steroids.

Catching Up With Joey Jay

Joseph Richard Jay, born in 1935 in Middletown, Connecticut, should be a familiar name to anyone who followed National League baseball in the 1950s and 1960s. Better known as Joey Jay, he broke into the big leagues as a 17-year-old and pitched as a member of the Milwaukee Braves from 1953-1960. A trade sent him to the Cincinnati Reds, where he enjoyed success from 1961-1966. A 21-game winner in 1961 and 1962, Jay made his lone All-Star appearance in 1961, and started and won Game 2 of the World Series against the New York Yankees.

Just one win shy of 100 for his career, Jay retired in 1966 due to arm injuries after a brief stint with the Atlanta Braves. In 2008, he earned an induction into the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame. A resident of the Tampa Bay area, Jay recently took some time to talk about his memorable playing career. The following is the first of a two-part interview with Joey Jay.

Q. You were signed by the Milwaukee Braves in 1953 for a $20,000 bonus (roughly $153,400 in today’s dollars). Was there a lot of pressure on you as a 17-year-old kid to come in and live up to that money?

A. It was an unfortunate situation and setup, really. The bonus rule made you stay with the team for two years. It probably took two productive years off my career, because the manager at that time (Charlie Grimm) didn’t think much of the rule or didn’t think much of having me on the team. I really didn’t get much of an opportunity. The first year I signed, I signed in June right after high school. I did get a chance to pitch after the pennant race had been decided. I can’t remember where we finished, but we didn’t win it. There was about a week left in the season, and the only game I started I won.

Those were a difficult two years. I wish the rule wasn’t in place, but I didn’t make it. I had to stay with the team for two years. They sent me to the minors in 1956 and most of 1957 for some seasoning. Really, I lost a couple of productive years because of that rule.

Q. You were playing with a group of All-Stars and some future Hall of Famers in Milwaukee, too.

A. That was another reason I didn’t get to play. I played with a group that included Warren Spahn, Lew Burdette, Bob Buhl. These were great pitchers and perennial 18-to-20-game winners. It was a great pitching staff and one of the reasons I didn’t get to pitch right away.

Q. Was there an opportunity to learn from these pitchers as you developed your own game, sort of an apprenticeship?

A. There were no apprenticeships in those days (laughs). The players kind of guarded their careers. The pitchers and most all players, really, played when they were hurt because they were afraid if someone took their place it might mean their job. So they weren’t too open as far as being teachers or anything. I learned from watching, and we had a great pitching coach in Bucky Walters. So an apprenticeship maybe in that sense, but I didn’t get a lot of teaching or help from the players.

Q. In 1957 and 1958, the Braves made two consecutive World Series appearances. What was your role on those teams?

A. Well, in 1957 I was only with the team briefly. We were world champions that year. I spent most of the time in the minor leagues, but they brought me up towards the end of the year and I saved a game in Chicago. I wasn’t on the World Series roster that year. In 1958, I had been scheduled to start the third game of the World Series. The last series we played in St. Louis, I got hit with a line-drive. It broke my finger and knocked me out of the Series.

Q. By 1961, you were traded to Cincinnati where your career was really able to get off the ground.

A. Correct, in December 1960 the Braves traded me to the Reds. Milwaukee felt they could continue their winning ways by bolstering the shortstop position. Johnny Logan was a great player for the Braves but he was getting old. They felt that Roy McMillan, who played for the Reds, would fill the gap for them. So they made the deal with me and Juan Pizzaro for McMillan.

That’s when I really got an opportunity. With Milwaukee in the later years – 1958, 1959 and so on – I was a spot starter. Mainly I took the place of Warren Spahn against teams he had trouble with like the Dodgers, and I took Bob Buhl’s place against Cincinnati because he had trouble with them. So I was a spot starter and a long reliever.

The Reds installed me immediately in the starting rotation and went on to have the best years of my career. I won 21 games in 1961, and of course my biggest accomplishment that year was beating Milwaukee six times. They actually finished 10 games back in fourth, so that was the difference between them being right there in the race.

Q. You also started and won Game 2 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium. What was it like being on that stage?

A. I grew up in Connecticut, about 100 miles from Yankee Stadium. So I got to see a number of games there as a kid, followed them on the radio, and we were big Yankee fans up in Connecticut. It was a big thrill to pitch against the Yankees in that arena. I had a good game (complete-game four-hitter with six strikeouts) and we won it, 6-2. It actually turned out to be the only game we’d win in that World Series.

Q. Any nerves having to face the likes of Mantle and Maris, particularly given their home run barrage that season?

A. They were highly publicized and great ballplayers. I had to pitch them carefully and had nothing but respect for them. I had faced Maris in the minors, and pitched against Mantle in Spring Training. Not quite the same thing, but I got a feel for them. It was exciting to pitch against them, though. Not just against Mantle and Maris and Berra, but you’re pitching against all the ghosts of the Yankees like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, they’re all there (laughs).

Q. To top it off, you made the cover of Sports Illustrated that month. That had to be a huge thrill.

A. It was kind of unexpected, really. I can’t remember if they told me it was coming or not. Yeah, it was definitely a thrill. I think I still have a copy of it around here somewhere.

Palmer vs Nicklaus at Palma Ceia, 2/21/64

On February 21, 1964, two of the biggest stars in all of sports, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, came to Tampa to play 18 holes of golf in a charity exhibition. The match, which took place at Palma Ceia Golf & Country Club, would be the first round of golf in Tampa for both players.

Nicklaus, 24, arrived in Tampa coming off a 1963 season in which he won the Masters and the PGA Championship. Palmer, 34, won eight tournaments in 1963, but no majors. He could hang his hat, however, on the then-record $128,000 ($850,000 in today’s dollars) in winnings he earned that season. Local pros Skip Alexander of St. Petersburg and Henry Castillo, Palma Ceia’s resident pro, were paired with Nicklaus and Palmer for the competition.

Prior to the match, Nicklaus and Palmer put on a clinic on the finer points of driving. The two also took turns making jokes to entertain the crowd over the public address system.
Nicklaus joked that the two almost missed the event because of an accident.

“Arnie had a terrible accident,” Nicklaus said. “He fell off his wallet.”

Palmer, in turn, ribbed Nicklaus about his appearance.

“Look at him - white shoes in the winter time. He’s the worst-dressed man in the high-priced field.”

A crowd of 5,000 spectators jammed the pristine course to witness two of the world’s best in action. One of those in attendance, Cincinnati Reds pitcher Joey Jay, recalls getting to meet Palmer after the round.

“I remember it well,” Jay says. “At that time, I was only a small golf fan and had gone with a friend of mine who was a member of the club. Afterwards, I got to meet Palmer over some refreshments and, looking back now, realize it was something special to see these guys at that point in their careers.”

So many fans showed up for the match that people often stood five-deep to watch the action on the course. Children climbed trees to get a better look. One of the kids in attendance that day, Buddy Alexander, enjoyed watching from the gallery while his father played a round with two legends.

Now the head golf coach at the University of Florida, Alexander was only 11 years old at the time and remembers the significance the day held for him, if not for his father.

“Well, my dad played on the tour and was on a few Ryder Cup teams in the 1950s,” Alexander recently said. “So this exhibition probably wasn’t the highlight of his career. Still, it was a pretty big deal to play with those guys at a club just across the Bay from where he lived.

Now for me, it was a huge day. I’d already started playing junior tournaments and competitive golf, so to see Nicklaus and Palmer in person was quite a thrill.”

Everyone in attendance who came to see world-class golf in person did not leave disappointed. If anything, they saw two of the best in the world look quite mortal against a very challenging par-70 Palma Ceia course. Nicklaus hit a ball out of bounds on the 2nd hole, and both golfers hit the ball out of bounds on the 18th hole, where Palmer suffered a double-bogey 7.

“Everybody said this was an easy course,” Nicklaus said after the round. “It’s not. You have to be very careful. It’s tight, but it’s not unfair. It has some wonderful par-3s. I think it plays well to a par-70.”

Palmer appeared poised to tame the course with a 68 when he reached the 18th hole, a 482-yard par-5. On his approach shot to the green, however, Palmer nearly hit the clubhouse. Four strokes later, Palmer was done for the day and finished at even-par 70.

Nicklaus finished just behind Palmer, shooting a 1-over 71 for the day. Alexander and Castillo held their own right along with them, shooting 72 and 74, respectively.

The scores would get better as 1964 progressed for both Nicklaus and Palmer. Nicklaus would win four tournaments that year and finish as runner-up at The Masters, six shots behind Palmer. For Palmer, it would be his fourth overall Masters victory and the final major tournament victory of his career.