The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
A favorite son who forgot his hometown
Looking back on the long conversation we had a few weeks back, it struck me how much Bill Denehy still embraces his hometown after all these years.
Middletown was the launching pad toward Denehy’s career in the major leagues. He is still close to people who live here. The personal stories about growing up in the city that he shares in his book, “Rage,” would bring a smile to the locals’ faces.
And then, there’s Joey Jay. He just turned his back on us.
If Middletown had a Mount Rushmore for its most accomplished ballplayers, the faces of Jay, Jeff Bagwell, Denehy and Mark DeJohn would grace it. Before going on to varying degrees of success in Major League Baseball, all four began the journey here — Bagwell at Xavier High, and Jay, Denehy and DeJohn at Woodrow Wilson High School.
If world-famous fighter Willie Pep put the city on the national sports map for good in the 1940s, Jay did the same from a baseball standpoint in the 1950s. The reverence folks around these parts still have for him is obvious. He had two 21-win seasons in the majors. He pitched in the World Series and beat the Yankees. Frank Robinson, Warren Spahn and Eddie Mathews were among his teammates.
Jay is still a big deal in Middletown, even if he essentially disowned the community. Is there any other way to say it? There is
distance in a figurative sense — he’s been a ghost for some time. In reality, he turned 83 last week somewhere Down South. Oh, the questions I’d love to ask him.
His history is fascinating to this day.
Joseph Richard Jay was an only child, born in Middlesex County on Aug. 15, 1935. His father played semi-pro ball and once had a tryout with the Boston Braves in 1937. Ultimately, he returned to Middletown and found work as a laborer to support the family.
The son played Little League and Ahern-Whalen baseball and later grew into a right-handed power pitcher for Woodrow Wilson and the American Legion squad. He played under Gene Pehota at Wilson and threw three nohitters for the Wildcats.
After graduating in 1953, he was signed by the Milwaukee Braves on June 24, receiving a bonus offer of $40,000. Just days after getting his diploma, he was rubbing elbows (or so we thought) with the likes of Spahn, Mathews, Lew Burdette and Joe Adcock.
On July 21, just 25 days shy of his 18th birthday, Jay debuted against Philadelphia in a relief role, thus becoming the first alumnus of Little League anywhere to play in the major leagues.
At that time, Jay was one of MLB’s first “bonus babies.” The bonus rule, maybe unintentionally, slowed his professional growth. Instituted the year Jay was signed, the rule essentially stated that if a club signed a player for more than $6,000, it could not option the player to the minors unless he cleared waivers. Since Jay signed for well more than that — the
Braves obviously felt he was the real thing — the rule mandated that the club had to keep him on their major league roster for two years.
Because of these circumstances, Jay was resented in his own clubhouse, particularly by veteran players.
“It was pretty dreadful,” he told the Society for American Baseball Research several years ago. “I fitted in nowhere. No one was deliberately unkind to me. I was just ignored and felt like the batboy.”
Jay made his second and final appearance of the 1953 season when he started the second game of a Sept. 20 doubleheader against Cincinnati. He went the distance (seven innings), shutting out the Reds on three hits in a 3-0 victory.
He got very little playing time in the 1954, ’55 and ‘57 seasons (he spent the entire ’56 season in the minors). In 1958, still only 22, Jay made 12 starts and went 7-5 with a 2.14 ERA in 136
1⁄3innings.
This was the opening he needed to establish himself with the Braves, but it died when, as the SABR story notes, Jay reported out of shape for the ’59 season. He regressed to a 6-11 record in 19 starts and a 4.09 ERA.
In 1960, Milwaukee changed managers, and he and Chuck Dressen did not get along. Jay again was used more out of the bullpen than as a starter. In the offseason, former Reds manager Birdie Tebbetts was hired to work in the Braves’ front office. He coveted Cincinnati’s Roy McMillan and packaged Jay and another young arm in a trade for the shortstop.
This was the break Jay needed to become a regular in the rotation. He made 34 starts covering 247
1⁄3innings for the 1961 Reds. He won 21 games, completed 14 and had four shutouts. His ERA was 3.53, he
made the All-Star team and finished fifth in MVP voting.
And he wound up, at age 25, pitching in the World Series. In Game 2 against the Yankees, Jay went the distance, allowing only four hits to give the Reds their only win of the Series. His worst mistake: allowing a two-run home run to Yogi Berra in the fourth inning.
As good as Jay was in Game 2, the wheels came off in Game 5. Pitching on three days’ rest, he did not get out of the first inning. He faced six batters and retired just two, allowing four runs on four hits. The Yankees scored five runs, two on Johnny Blanchard’s home run off of Jay, and went on to a Series-clinching 13-5 victory.
Jay was just as good in 1962, when he made 37 starts and again won 21 games, threw four shutouts and posted an ERA of 3.76. He was the first Reds pitcher to have successive 20win seasons since Bucky Walters in 1939-40. Jay also beat the Braves three times that season, to the tune of a 1.35 ERA in four starts.
After that, for reasons including a falling out with management, Jay was never the same pitcher. From 1963 until his final season in 1966, when the Reds ended up trading him to Atlanta, he lost (49) more games than he won (39). In his short time with the ’66 Braves, where he counted Hank Aaron and Joe Torre as teammates, he was 0-4 in eight starts. For his career, he was 99-91 with a 3.77 ERA and 99 strikeouts.
If Jay indeed returned to Middletown to check in after retirement, it wasn’t public knowledge. By most accounts, there wasn’t an opportunity on city soil to acknowledge his career.
In 1994, the Middletown Sports Hall of Fame inducted its first class of athletes. Joey Jay had to be
part of it, right? The significance of the first set of Hall of Famers wasn’t lost on anyone. Pep, Norm Daniels, Waino Fillback. Larry McHugh, Bill Pomfret and Bernie O’Rourke were part of that class with Jay.
Jay did not come. The Hall’s leadership worked to connect with him and subsequent attempts to locate him, including several by the Press, have come up empty. His presence really would have been the icing on that night. Instead, Edward Collins, the former Wilson coach who was inducted himself in later years, stood in on Jay’s behalf.
In 2008, the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame inducted Jay, Barry Larkin, Cesar Geronimo and executive Gary Hermann. Jay attended the festivities.
“He was excited to be here,” Chris Eckes, chief curator of the Reds Hall of Fame, told the Press. “He had a contingent of family with him. One of my coworkers found him to be very forthcoming, very humble. Inductees give two speeches, one on the field Saturday and at a gala on Sunday. He was very grateful for his time spent in baseball.”
Except for that appearance, Jay appears to have made a clean break from the game. He had success at one time or another investing in oil, taxicabs, limousines and building maintenance firms. He had no intention of including baseball in his post-playing life, saying it was “infantile to keep thinking about the game.” He turned down many an invitation to card shows or fantasy camps.
“I don’t live in the past, like most ballplayers,” Jay once said. “When I made the break it was clean and forever.”
Middletown knows the feeling.