San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
JONES’ DEBUT 50 YEARS AGO HAD LEGENDARY FIRST
Buried deep inside a trunk stored in the rafters of Randy Jones’ Escondido home is an old sanitary sock.
The sock contains baseballs signed by half a dozen Hall of Famers, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron among them.
“There’s some good baseballs in there,” said Jones, who quickly dismissed any suggestion of digging out the sock for old times’ sake. “Remember, I just had spine surgery (three months ago). I’m not getting on a ladder and getting them down.”
The signatures may have faded in the decades since the balls were signed, but the major league memories remain as sharp as ever.
Jones debuted for the Padres 50 years ago — June 16, 1973 — against the New York Mets at Shea Stadium.
Fred Norman had been traded to the Reds four days earlier, so the Padres were lacking a left-hander. Enter Jones, then 23, who was drafted in the fifth round a year earlier out of Chapman University.
“I was 8-1 at the time in the Texas League,” said Jones, who was honored Friday night before the Padres opened a series against Tampa Bay at Petco Park. “Opportune time. Right guy at the right place.”
Not much was going right for the Padres when Jones was summoned from the bullpen.
They were down five runs midway through a game they would lose 10-2 before 24,452 fans.
Jones pitched a 1-2-3 fifth inning, getting third baseman Ted Martinez and catcher Duffy Dyer on balls back to the mound before retiring pitcher Jerry Koosman on a fly ball to right field.
“My first inning was awfully pretty,” Jones said.
When he returned in the sixth, Jones completed his warmup pitches and catcher Fred Kendall threw the ball down to second base. It was whipped around the infield and ended up in the hands of third baseman Dave Roberts.
“Dave runs over and flips me the baseball,” Jones said, “and then he asks me, ‘Do you know who the hitter is?’
“I turned around and it was Willie Mays. Damn.”
Jones remembers getting Mays in a 1-2 hole and knew exactly what he wanted to do next.
“Figured I’d throw him a ball down and in and he’d pull it foul,” Jones said. “I was wrong.”
Instead, Mays hit a ball none of the fielders were going to get to, as he had done 655 times previously over his Hall of Fame career.
“He hit that ball so hard you wouldn’t believe it,” Jones said. “It disappeared in the dark over the bullpen in left field . ... They still haven’t found it. It must have gotten lost in the parking lot somewhere.”
Jones doesn’t remember Mays’ entire trip around the bases, but he does recall watching him come around third base and touching the plate.
“I remember that much,” Jones said, “because they won’t give you a new baseball until he reaches the plate . ...
“I just remember thinking, ‘I’ll be damned, my first big league hit (allowed) is a home run to Willie Mays. I had the rosin bag, threw it down and said, ‘What the hell, it’s not that bad.’ ”
Jones tried to calm himself thereafter. He was not successful.
“I was crazy after that,” he said. “You get rattled.”
He allowed hits to three of the next four batters before Padres manager Don Zimmer came out and replaced him with reliever Bob Miller.
It was Miller, earlier in the bullpen, who had advised the rookie to “just throw strikes.”
“I’ve got your strikes,” Jones told Miller afterwards.
The next day, Jones approached Mays before the game with a baseball for an autograph.
Jones went 7-6 with a 3.16 ERA on the season. His other 19 appearances all were as a starter.
The first start came a week after his debut, against the Atlanta Braves at San Diego Stadium. A crowd of 6,039 saw Jones allow five hits and three runs over seven innings of a 7-3 loss.
Jones allowed one home run in the game.
“And who did I give up a home run to?” Jones asked. Hank Aaron. “There you go,” Jones said with a laugh. “I didn’t mess around, man. I was getting the big boys out of the way.”
Aaron, like Mays, also obliged Jones with his autograph, signing a ball as effortlessly as he hit it.
“He just kind of flicked his wrists and it went into the left-center seats about nine rows up,” Jones said. “I just remember watching that ball hit that seat and going, ‘Damn, he didn’t even swing that hard.’ It kind of freaked me out.”
It didn’t shake Jones’ confidence, however.
“I looked at my wife, Marie, on the way home after the game,” Jones said, “and I told her, ‘I can pitch up here. I can get these guys out.’ ”
The glance Marie Jones returned was not one of reassurance.
“She wasn’t buying it whatsoever,” Jones laughed.
It would be a couple of years before he could prove it.
In 1974, Jones went 8-22, suffering more losses than any other pitcher in the National League.
He turned it around in 1975, becoming the Padres’ first 20-game winner with a 20-12 record and an Nl-leading 2.24 ERA.
In 1976, Jones earned the NL Cy Young Award with a 22-14 record. He led the majors in games started (40), games completed (25) and innings pitched (3151⁄3), doing so not with a blazing fastball but a sinkerball that batters beat into the ground for infield outs.
Jones was 16-3 at the Allstar break, prompting Sports Illustrated to put him on its cover with the headline: “Threat to win 30. San Diego’s confounding Randy Jones.”
No pitcher has matched that first-half win total since.
The curly-haired lefty captivated the city in the mid-1970s, crowds swelling for his home starts.
After warming up in the bullpen before games, Jones would walk back to the dugout to standing ovations.
No Padres pitcher since has received that recognition, either.