The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hall of Famer, ex-U.S. senator dies at 85
Pitcher’s 224 wins included perfect game with Phillies.
Jim Bunning, the only person elected both to baseball’s Hall of Fame and the U.S. Senate and a central figure in the best and worst moments of the Philadelphia Phillies’ historic 1964 season, died late Friday night. Bunning, who had suffered a stroke in October, was 85.
The first pitcher to throw no-hitters in both the American and National Leagues, he won 224 games in 17 big league seasons with the Tigers, Phillies, Pirates and Dodgers. Eighty-nine of those victories came during six years with the Phillies, and Bunning’s “14” is one of just five numbers retired by the club.
Bunning also was an outspoken players union leader, a minor league manager and a players agent before abandoning the game for his insurance business and eventually a long political career in his native Kentucky and Washington, D.C.
A conservative Republican, he won the first of six consecutive terms as a U.S. representative from Kentucky’s Fourth District in 1986. Elected twice to the U.S. Senate, he served there from 1998 to 2010.
For all of his varied achievements, Bunning always will be best remembered in Philadelphia for that star-crossed 1964 season.
On Father’s Day, June 21, with his wife and oldest child at Shea Stadium, he threw a perfect game against the New York Mets, the first in the National League since 1880, the first in regular-season baseball since 1922.
He won 19 games for Gene Mauch’s surprising club, which built a 6½-game lead with 12 to play. But when Mauch twice started Bunning and Chris Short on two days rest in those final weeks, the Phillies lost 10 straight. Even though Bunning shut out Cincinnati on the season’s final day, Philadelphia lost the pennant to the St. Louis Cardinals by one game.
“I don’t blame Gene for that,” Bunning said in 1989. “The rest of his pitching staff was either hurt or didn’t want the ball. What else could he have done?”
Bunning was a leader on those Phillies teams, both on and off the field. As their player representative, he lobbied for simple benefits his teammates had long been denied. And on the mound, with an exaggerated sidearm motion, he was one of baseball’s best right-handers.
After retiring in 1971, Bunning managed in Philadelphia’s minor league system through 1976.
The father of nine children, he returned to his northern Kentucky home, where he ran an insurance business and dabbled as a sports agent before entering politics. He was elected to the Fort Thomas City Council and the state senate before entering Congress in 1987.
A member of the Senate’s Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, his final Senate years were marked by bouts of bizarre behavior. In his 2004 re-election campaign, he accused members of his Democratic opponent’s staff of assaulting his wife. He did not seek a third term in 2010.
In addition to his nine children, Bunning had 35 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. One grandson, Patrick Towles, is a quarterback at Boston College.
Bunning, who is wearing a Phillies cap on his Hall of Fame plaque despite spending his first nine big league seasons in Detroit, returned to Philadelphia regularly through the years for team events. Invariably, the conversations always turned to the disappointment of 1964.
“Mentally, I’ve never gotten over it,” he said in 2009. “It was as close as I ever got (to a World Series).”